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JAMES POTT & COc 



TROW DIRECTORY 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



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BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 



FROM 



CHARLES KINGSLEY 




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ARRANGED BY 

PHILIP W. WILSON 



NEW YORK 

JAMES POTT & CO^ PUBLISHERS 
1901 



COPYBIGHT, 1899, BT 

JAMES POTT & Ci 



TROW DIRECTORY 

PRINTINQ AND BOOKBtNOINQ COMPANV 

NEW YORK 



PEEFACE 

The message which Charles Kingsley gave 
to his generation was that the Christian had 
to show forth in his outward acts and way 
of living the beauty of the Christ-life. He 
maintained that if men believed in Christ 
that they showed evidence of that faith in 
all that they did. Hence his love of all high 
and noble actions, of chivalrous and unself- 
ish deeds, of passions conquered, of the gen- 
tleness of strength, and the meekness of 
patience; and his hatred and scorn of all 
subterfuge and lying, of all meanness and 
double-dealing, of treachery and fraud, of 
mere brute strength, and of all coarseness. 
To Charles Kingsley, Christ was the type and 
ideal to which all men were to endeavor 



vi PREFACE 



to live up. The Christ-life was not to be 
dreamed about or pondered over, but to be 
lived. To all who love the words and works 
of this Christian gentleman this day-book of 
beautiful thoughts is offered, sure that they 
will find each day some noble thought, some 
appeal to noble action, and some aid to a 
noble life. 



June 13, 1899. 



JANUARY. 



January 1st. 
There sat Eaphael Aben-Ezra, work- 
ing out the last formula of the great 
world problem — " Given Self : to find 
God." 

"Hypatia,^* chap. xiii. 

January 2d, 
Ah, my friend, we must look out and 
around, to see what God is like. It is 
when we persist in turning our eyes 
inward, and prying curiously over our 
own imperfections, that we learn to 
make a God after our own image, and 
fancy that our own darkness and 
hardness of heart are the patterns of 
His Light and Love. 

^^ Hyjoatia,^^ chap. xi. 



BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 



January 3d. 
If the One Spirit permeated all 
things, if Its all-energizing Presence 
linked the flower with the crystal as 
well as with the demon and the god, 
must it not link together also the two 
extremes of the great chain of being ? 
bind even the nameless One Itself to 
the smallest creature which bore Its 
creative impress ? 

^^Hypatia,^^ chap, xxv, 

January Ifth. 
It is not enough to say with the 
Christians, that God has made the 
world, if we make that very assertion 
an excuse for believing that His Pres- 
ence has been ever since withdrawn 
from it. 

^* Hypatia,^^ chap. xv. 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLET. 5 

January 5th. 
And so on, through and in spite of 
all conceits, allegories, overstrained in- 
terpretations, Augustine went on evolv- 
ing from the Psalms, and from the 
Past, and from the Future, the asser- 
tion of a Living, Present God, the 
Eternal Enemy of discord, injustice, 
and evil, the Eternal Helper and De- 
liverer of those Avho were enslaved 
and crushed thereby in soul or body. 

^^ Hypatia,^^ chap, xxi. 



January 6th. 
"What if the Jehovah of the old 
Scriptures were not merely the na- 
tional patron of the children of Abra- 
ham, as the Rabbis held ; not merely, 



BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 



as Philo held, the Divine Wisdom 
which inspired a few elect sages, even 
among the heathen; but the Lord of 
the whole earth, and of the nations 
thereof ? — And suddenly, for the first 
time in his life, passages from the 
psalms and prophets flashed across 
him, which seemed to assert this. 
What if this same Jehovah, Wisdom, 
Logos, call him what they might, 
were actually the God of the spirits, as 
well as of the bodies of all flesh? 
What if he was as near — Augustine 
said that he was — to the hearts of 
those wild Markmen, Gauls, Thracians, 
as to Augustine's own heart? What 
if he were — Augustine said he was — 
yearning after, enlightening, leading 
home to himself, the souls of the poor- 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 7 

est, the most brutal, the most sinful ? 
— "What if he loved man as man, and 
not merely one favored race or one 
favored class of minds ? . . . And in 
the light of that hypothesis, that 
strange story of the Cross of Calvary 
seemed not so impossible after all. 

^^ JByjpatia,^^ chap. xxi. 



January 7ih, 

" Men have lied to you about Him, 
mother : but ,has He ever lied to you 
about Himself ? He did not lie to me, 
when He sent me out into the world 
to find a man, and sent me back again 
to you with the good news that The 
Man is born into the world. '' 

"And did He send you hither? 



BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 



Well — that was more like what I used 
to fancy Him. ... A grand thought it 
is after all — a Jew the king of heaven 
and earth! . . . Well — I shall know 
soon. ... I loved Him once, . . . and 
perhaps . . . perhaps. ..." 

^^ Hypaiiay^' chap. xxx. 

January 8th. 
" IS'ow I have always had a sort of 
fancy that what we wanted, as the 
first predicate of our Absolute One, 
was that He was to be not merely an 
infinite God — whatever that meant, 
which I suspect we did not always see 
quite clearly — or an eternal one — or 
an omnipotent one — or even merely a 
one God at all ; — none of which pred- 
icates, I fear, did we understand 



FROM CHARLES KING8LEY. 9 

more clearly than the first: but that 
He must be a righteous God : — or 
rather, as we used sometimes to say 
that He was to have no predicate — 
Bighteousness itself." 

' ' Hypatia^ "chap, xxvii . 

January 9th, 
"And what if you have found a 
Man in that crucified One ? Have you 
found in Him a God also ? " 

"jBi^paiia," chap, xxvii. 

January 10th. 
"Does Hypatia recollect Glaucon's 
definition of the perfectly righteous 
man ? . . . How, without being guilty 
of one unrighteous act, he must labor 
his life long under the imputation of 



10 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

being utterly unrighteous, in order 
that his disinterestedness may be 
thoroughly tested, and by proceeding 
in such a course, arrive inevitably, as 
Glaucon says, not only in Athens of 
old, or in Judaea of old, but, as you 
yourself will agree, in Christian Alex- 
andria at this moment, at — do you 
remember, Hypatia? — bonds, and the 
scourge, and, lastly, at the cross itself. 
... If Plato's idea of the righteous 
man be a crucified one, why may not 
mine also ? " 

" £^l)rpa<^a, " chap, xxvii. 

January 11th. 
" Did you ever yet consider at leis- 
ure what the Archetype of Man might 
belike?" 

''* Hypatia^'' ^ cbap. xxi. 



FBOM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 11 

January IMh. 
" Be it so, if you will. But — must 
we not say that the archetype — the 
very man — that if he is the archetype, 
he, too, will be, or must have been, 
once, at least, temporarily enchanted 
into an animal body? . . . You are 
silent. I will not press you. . . . Only 
ask you to consider, at your leisure, 
whether Plato may not justify some- 
what from the charge of absurdity the 
fisherman of Galilee, where he said 
that He in whose image man is made, 
was made flesh, and dwelt with him 
bodily, there by the lake side at Ti- 
berias, and that he beheld His glory, 
the glory as of the only begotten of 
the Father." 

^^ Hypaiia,^^ chap, xxvii. 



12 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

January 13 th. 
" Tell me, then — this Archetype of 
Man, if it exists anywhere, it must ex- 
ist eternally in the Mind of God. . . . 
And derive its existence immediately 
from Him? . . . But a man is one 
willing person, unlike to all others. 
. . . Then this Archetype must be 
such, and possessing the faculties and 
properties of all men in their highest 
perfection. Is it not the property of 
every man to be a son ? For you can 
conceive of a man as not being a 
father, but not as not being a son. . . . 
Then this Archetype must be a son 
also. . . . Why not of ' Zeus, father 
of gods and men ' ? For we agreed 
that it — we will call it He now, having 
agreed that it is a person — could owe 



FBOM CHARLES KINOSLEY. 13 

its existence to none but God Him- 
self." 

^^ Hypatia,^^ chap, xxvii. 

Jcmuary llfth. 
Must not a son be of the same 
species as his father ? " Eagles," says 
the poet, " do not beget doves." Is the 
word son anything but an empty and 
false metaphor, unless the son be the 
perfect and equal likeness of his father ? 
. . . We are talking of a perfect and 
Archetypal Son, and a perfect and 
Archetypal Father, in a perfect and 
eternal world, wherein is neither 
growth, decay, nor change: and of a 
perfect and archetypal generation, of 
which the only definition can be, that 
like begets its perfect like. . . . You 



14 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

are silent. ... Be so. . . . We have 
gone up too far into the abysses. 

" JTyj^a^m," chap, xxvii. 



January 15th. 
What if I had discovered that right- 
eousness, and it alone was the beauti- 
ful, righteousness the sublime, the 
heavenly, the Godlike — ay, God Him- 
self ? And, what if it had dawned on 
me, as by a great sunrise, what that 
righteousness was like? What if I 
had seen a human being, a Avoman, too, 
a young weak girl, showing forth the 
glory and the beauty of God ? show- 
ing me that the beautiful was to mingle 
unshrinking, for duty's sake, with all 
that is most foul and loathsome ; that 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 15 

the sublime was to stoop to the most 
menial offices, the most outwardly-de- 
grading self-denials ; that to be heav- 
enly, was to know that the commonest 
relations, the most vulgar duties, of 
earth, were God's commands, and only 
to be performed aright by the help of 
the same spirit by which He rules the 
Universe; that righteousness was to 
love, to help, to suffer for — if need be, 
to die for — those who, in themselves, 
seem fitted to arouse no feelings except 
indignation and disgust ? "What if, for 
the first time, I trust not for the last 
time, in my life, I saw this vision ; and 
at the sight of it my eyes were opened, 
and I knew it for the likeness and the 
glory of God ? 

^' Hypatia,^^ chap, xxvii. 



16 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

January 16th. 
If for the good of others, man has 
strength to sacrifice himself in part, 
God will have strength to sacrifice 
Himself utterly. If He has not done 
it, He will do it : or He will be less 
beautiful, less sublime, less heavenly, 
less righteous than my poor conception 
of Him. 

^^ Hypaiia,^^ chap, xxvii. 



January 17th. 
" And if He be righteous, and right- 
eousness be — as I know it to be — iden- 
tical with love, then He will desire 
that highest good for men far more 
than they can desire it for themselves. 
. . . Then He will desire to show 



FROM CHARLES KINQ8LEY. 17 

Himself and, His own righteousness to 
them." 

^^ Hypatia,^' chap, xxvii. 

January 18th, 
At least let me go on to say this, that 
if God does desire to show His right- 
eousness to men, His only perfect 
method, according to Plato, will be 
that of calumny, persecution, the 
scourge, and the cross, that so He, like 
Glaucon's righteous man, may remain 
forever free from any suspicion of self- 
ish interest, or weakness of endurance. 

" Hypatia,^^ chap, xxvii. 

January 19th. 
The Galilaean. ... H he conquers 
strong men, can the weak maid resist 
him? 

** Hypatia," chap, xxvii. 



18 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

January WtJi. 
Man abhors the cross : the Son of 
God condescended to endure it ! Man 
tramples on the poor : the Son of God 
hath not where to lay His head. Man 
passes by the sick as useless : the Son 
of God chooses them to be partakers 
of His sufferings, that the glory of 
God may be made manifest in them. 
Man curses the publican, while he em- 
ploys him to fill his coifers with the 
plunder of the poor : the Son of God 
calls him from the receipt of custom to 
be an apostle, higher than the kings of 
the earth. Man casts away the harlot 
like a faded flower, when he has 
tempted her to become the slave of 
sin for a season : and the Son of God 
calls her, the defiled, the despised, the 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 19 

forsaken, to Himself , accepts her tears, 
blesses her offering, and declares that 
her sins are forgiven, for she hath 
loved much ; while to whom little is 
forgiven, the same loveth little. . . . 

*^ Hypatia,'^ chap, xxvii. 

January '21st. 
Yes, men have separated from each 
other, slandered each other, murdered 
each other in that name; and blas- 
phemed it by that very act. But when 
did they unite in any name but that ? 
Look all history through — from the 
early churches, unconscious and infan- 
tile ideas of God's kingdom, as Eden 
was of the human race, when love 
alone was law, and none said that 
aught that he possessed was his own, 



20 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

but they had all things in common — 
whose name was the bond of unity for 
that brotherhood, such as the earth 
had never seen — when the Eoman lady 
and the negro slave partook together 
at the table of the same bread and 
wine, and sat together at the feet of 
the Syrian tent-maker ? " One is our 
Master, even Christ, who sits at the 
right hand of God, and in Him we are 
all brothers." ]^ot self-chosen prefer- 
ence for His precepts, but the over- 
whelming faith in His presence, His 
rule. His love, bound those rich hearts 
together. 

^^ Alton LocJce,^^ chap, xxxvii. 

January 22d. 
"Look onward, too, at the first fol- 
lowers of St. Bennet and St. Francis, 



FROM CHARLES KING8LEY. 21 

at the Cameronians among their Scot- 
tish hills, or the little persecuted flock 
who, in a dark and godless time, gath- 
ered around John Wesley by pit- 
mouths and on Cornish cliffs — Look, 
too, at the great societies of our own 
days, which, however imperfectly, still 
lovingly and earnestly do their meas- 
ure of God's work at home and abroad ; 
and say, when was there ever real 
union, cooperation, philanthropy, equal- 
ity, brotherhood, among men, save in 
loyalty to Him — Jesus, who died upon 
the cross ? " 

^^ Alton Locke,'''' chap, xxxvii, , 

January 23d. 
So high he could rise : but not be- 
yond. For the notion of that God- 



22 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

man was receding fast to more and 
more awful and abysmal heights, in the 
minds of a generation who were for- 
getting His love in His Power, and 
practically losing sight of His human- 
ity in their eager doctrinal assertion of 
His Divinity. 

" Hypatia,^^ chap. xxiv. 



January 2^th, 
Weakness and not power be to man 
the symbol of divinity ; love and not 
cunning, be the arbiter of every cause ; 
and chivalry not fear, the spring of all 
obedience. 

*' Westward Ho!^^ chap. xvi. 



FBOM CHARLES KING8LEY, 23 

January 25th. 
" When CamiUe Desmoulins, the rev- 
olutionary, about to die, as is the fate 
of such, by the hands of revolutionaries, 
was asked his age, he answered, they 
say, that it was the same as that of the 
*bon sans-culotte Jesus.' I do not 
blame those who shrink from that 
speech as blasphemous. I, too, have 
spoken hasty words and hard, and 
prided myself on breaking the bruised 
reed, and quenching the smoking flax. 
Time was when I should have been the 
loudest in denouncing poor Camille ; 
but I have long since seemed to see in 
those words the distortion of an al- 
mighty truth — a truth that shall shake 
thrones, and principalities, and powers, 
and fill the earth with its sound, as 



24 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

with the trump of God; a prophecy 
like Balaam's of old — * I shall see Him, 
but not nigh ; I shall behold Him, but 
not near.' . . . Take all the heroes, 
prophets, poets, philosophers — where 
will you find the true demagogue — the 
speaker to man simply as man — the 
friend of publicans and sinners, the 
stern foe of the scribe and the Pharisee 
— with whom was no respect of per- 
sons — where is he ? Socrates and Plato 
were noble; Zerdusht and Confutzee, 
for aught we know, were nobler still ; 
but what were they but the exclusive 
mystagogues of an enlightened few, 
like our own Emersons and Strausses, 
to compare great with small ? What 
gospel have they, or Strauss, or Emer- 
son, for the poor, the suffering, the op- 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 25 

pressed ? The People's Friend ? Where 
will you find him, but in Jesus of 
JS'azareth ? " 

'^ Alton LhcJce,^^ chap, xxxvii. 

January 26th, 
She seemed to follow my eyes, and 
guess from them the workings of my 
heart; for now, in a low, half -ab- 
stracted voice, as Diotima may have 
talked of old, she began to speak of 
rest and labor, of death and life ; of a 
labor which is perfect rest — of a daily 
death, which is but daily birth — of 
weakness, which is the strength of 
God ; and so she wandered on in her 
speech to Him who died for us. And 
gradually she turned to me. She laid 
one finger solemnly on my listless 



26 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

palm, as her words and voice became 
more intense, more personal. She 
talked of Him, as Mary may have 
talked just risen from His feet. She 
spoke of Him as I had never heard 
Him spoken of before — with a tender, 
passionate loyalty, kept down and 
softened by the deepest awe. The 
sense of her intense belief, shining out 
in every lineament of her face, carried 
conviction to my heart more than ten 
thousand arguments could do. It must 
be true ! Was not the power of it 
around her like a glory ! She spoke of 
Him as near us — watching us — in 
words of such vivid eloquence that I 
turned half-startled to her, as if I ex- 
pected to see Him standing by her side. 

^' Alton Locke,^^ chap, xxxvii. 



FROM CHARLES KING8LEY. 27 

Jamiary 27th. 
She spoke of Him as the great Re- 
former ; and yet as the true conserva- 
tive ; the inspirer of all new truths, re- 
vealing in His Bible to every age 
abysses of new wisdom, as the times 
require ; and yet the vindicator of all 
which is ancient and eternal — the justi- 
fier of His own dealings with man 
from the beginning. She spoke of 
Him as the true demagogue — the 
champion of the poor ; and yet as the 
true King, above and below all earthly 
rank; on whose will alone all real 
superiority of man to man, all the 
time-justified and time-honored usages 
of the family, the society, the nation, 
stand and shall stand forever. 

^^ Alton Locke,^^ chap, xxxvii. 



28 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

January 28th. 

And then she changed her tone ; and 
in a voice of infinite tenderness, she 
spoke of Him as the Creator, the Word, 
the Inspirer, the only perfect Artist, 
the Fountain of all Genius. 

She made me feel — would that His 
ministers had made me feel it before, 
since they say that they believe it — 
that He had passed victorious through 
my vilest temptations, that He sympa- 
thized with my every struggle. 

She told me how He, in the first 
dawn of manhood, full of the dim con- 
sciousness of His own power, full of 
strange, yearning presentiments about 
His own sad and glorious destiny, went 
up into the wilderness, as every youth, 
above all every genius, must, there to 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 29 

be tempted of the devil. She told how 
alone with the wild beasts, and the 
brute powers of nature, He saw into 
the open secret — the mystery of man's 
twofold life. His kingship over earth. 
His sonship under God : and conquered 
in the might of His knowledge. How 
He was tempted, like every genius, to 
use His creative powers for selfish 
ends — to yield to the lust of display 
and singularity, and break through 
those laws which He came to reveal 
and to fulfil — to do one little act of 
evil, that He might secure thereby the 
harvest of good which was the object 
of His life : and how he had conquered 
in the faith that He was the son of 
God. She told me how He had borne 
the sorrows of genius ; how the slight- 



30 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

est pang that I had ever felt was but 
a dim, faint pattern of His ; how He, 
above all men, had felt the agony of 
calumny, misconception, misinterpreta- 
tion ; how He had fought with bigotry 
and stupidity, casting His pearls before 
swine, knowing full well what it was 
to speak to the deaf and the blind; 
how He had wept over Jerusalem, in 
the bitterness of disappointed patriot- 
ism, when He had tried in vain to 
awaken within a nation of slavish and 
yet rebellious bigots, the consciousness 
of their glorious calling. . . . 

^^ Alton Locke," chap, xxxvii. 

January 29th, 
Synesius sighed. " There is a ruin, 
which was last month a church." 



FEOM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 31 

"And is one still. Man did not 
place there the presence of God, and 
man cannot expel it." 

^*Sypdiia" chap. xxi. 

January 30th, 
" In utter abasement, I confessed my- 
self lower than the brutes, who had a 
law, and obeyed it, while I was my 
own lawless God, devil, harpy, whirl- 
wind. ... I needed even my own 
dog to awaken in me the brute con- 
sciousness of my own existence, or of 
anything without myself. I took her, 
the dog, for my teacher, and obeyed 
her, for she was wiser than I. And 
she led me back — the poor dumb beast 
— like a God-sent and God-obeying 
angel, to human nature, to mercy, to 



32 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

*-— ■■ — — — — — . ■ — — ■ ■■■ ■ ■ ' —^ 

self-sacrifice, to belief, to worship — to 
pure and wedded love." 

^^ Hypatia,^' chap, xxvii, 

Jamjuary 31st. 
You are free ; God has made you free. 
You are equals — you are brothers : for 
He is your King, Who is no respecter 
of persons. He is your King, Who 
has bought for you the rights of sons 
of God. . . . That was Luther's char- 
ter — with that alone he freed half Eu- 
rope. That is your charter and mine ; 
the everlasting ground of our rights, 
our mights, our duties, of ever-gather- 
ing storm for the oppressor, of ever- 
brightening sunshine for the oppressed. 
Own no other. Claim your investiture 
as free men from none but God. 

'^'^ Alton Locke j'^ chap, xxxvii. 



FEBRUARY. 



February 1st. 
O Love, Love, Love, the same in 
peasant and in peer ! The more honour 
to you, then, old Love, to be the same 
thing in this world which is common 
to peasant and to peer. They say that 
you are blind ; a dreamer, an exagger- 
ator — a liar, in short. They know 
just nothing about you, then. You 
will not see people as they seem, and 
as they have become, no doubt : but 
why? because you see them as they 
ought to be, and are, in some deep way, 
eternally, in the sight of Him Who 
conceived and created them. 

" Two Years Ago," 



36 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

February 2d. 

Love is like flame — light as many 
fresh flames at it as you will, it grows, 
instead of diminishing, by the disper- 
sion. 

•' Feast" 

February 3d. 
A blessed thing it is for any man or 
woman to have a friend; one human 
soul whom we can trust utterly ; who 
knows the best and the worst of us, and 
who loves us in spite of all our faults ; 
who will speak the honest truth to us ; 
who will give us counsel and reproof 
in the day of prosperity and self-con- 
ceit ; but who, again, will comfort and 
encourage us in the day of difiiculty 
and sorrow, when the world leaves us 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 37 

alone to fight our own battle as we 

can. 

" The Water of Life, ^^ xi. 

February J^th. 
As Lis eyes are opened to see that 
God made the one man for the one 
woman, and the one woman to the one 
man, even as it was in the Garden of 
Eden, so all his heart and thoughts be- 
come pure, and gentle, and simple, and 
the man feels that he is in harmony, 
for the first time in his life, with the 
Universe of God, and with the mystery 
of the seasons; that within him, as 
well as without him, the winter is past, 
and the rain is over and gone ; the 
flowers appear on the earth, and the 
voice of the turtle is heard in the land. 

" Hypatiay^^ chap. xxi. 



38 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

February 5th. 

I think every one learns to love his 
neighbour, very much as Moses told the 
Jews they would learn to love God ; 
namely, by trusting him somewhat 
blindly at first. 

Is it not so always with young 
people, when they begin to be fond of 
each other? They trust each other, 
they do not know why, or how. Be- 
fore they are married, they have little 
or no experience of each other; of 
each other's tempers and characters; 
and yet they trust each other, and say 
in their hearts, " He can never be false 
to me," and are ready to put their 
honour and fortunes into each other's 
hands, to live together for better for 
worse, till death do them part. It is 



FROM CHARLES KING8LEY, 39 

a blind faith in each other, that, and 
those who will may laugh at it, and 
call it the folly and rashness of youth. 
I do not believe that God laughs at it : 
that God calls it folly and rashness. 
It surely comes from God. 

*' Good News of God," ix. 



Fehruary 6th. 

As is the way with sailors (who af- 
ter all are the truest lovers, as they are 
the finest fellows, God bless them, 
upon earth), his lonely ship-watches 
had been spent in imprinting on his 
imagination, month after month, year 
after year, every feature and gesture 
and tone of the fair lass whom he had 
left behind him ; and that all the more 



40 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

intensely, because, beside his mother, 
he had no one else to think of, and 
was as pure as the day he was born, 
having been trained as many a brave 
young man was then, to look upon 
profligacy not as a proof of manhood, 
but as what the old Germans, and 
those Gortyneans who crowned the 
offender with wool, knew it to be, a 
cowardly and effeminate sin. 

'^ Westward Ho r' 



February 7th. 

It is an old jest — the fair devotee 
trying to convert the young rake. 
Men of the world laugh heartily at it ; 
so does the devil, no doubt. If any 
readers wish to be fellow-jesters with 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 41 

that personage, they may ; but, as sure 
as old Saxon women-worship remains 
forever a blessed and healing law of 
life, the devotee may yet convert the 
rake — and, perhaps, herself into the 
bargain. 



February 8th. 

O Woman I Woman ! Only true 
Missionary of civilization and broth- 
erhood, and gentle, forgiving Char- 
ity ; it is in thy power, and perhaps 
in thine only, to bind up the broken- 
hearted, to preach deliverance to the 
captives ! One real lady, who should 
dare to stoop, what might she not do 
with us— with our sisters ? If — 

*' Alton Locke,^' chap, xxiii. 



42 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

February 9th, 

If the woman will keep the man 
heroic, she must keep herself not he- 
roic only but devout likewise. 

^^ Hereward the Wake,^^ 

February 10th. 
Woman . . . must be led, not leader. 
If you love a woman, make her have 
faith in you. If you lean on her, you 
will ruin yourself and her as well. 

" YeaaV 

February 11th. 
" Yes, you do know the worst of me, 
and yet you love me still." This is 
Happiness, to find oneself most loved 
when one most hates oneself ! 

** Two Years Ago,^^ 



FEOM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 43 

February 12th. 

If Torfrida could have foreseen, and 
foreseen, and foreseen: — why, if she 
were true woman, she would have 
done exactly what she did, and taken 
the bitter with the sweet, the unknown 
with the known, as we all must do in 
life, unless we wish to live and die 
alone. 

^^ Hereward the Wake" 

February 13th. 

" It is a noble and a Holy fear. You 
fear her goodness. Could you see her 
goodness, much less fear it, were there 
not a Divine Light within you Which 
showed you what, and how awful good- 
ness was ? Tell me no more that you 
do not fear God; for he who fears 



44 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

Virtue, fears Him Whose likeness Yir- 
tue is. Go on — go on. . . . Be brave, 
and His Strength will be made mani- 
fest in your weakness." 

''Hypatia.^^ 

February IJfth. 
All best things become, when mis- 
used, the very worst ; and the love of 
woman, because it is able to lift man's 
soul to the heavens, is also able to drag 
him down to hell. 

''Westward Ho!" 

February 15th. 
There is a secret feeling in woman's 
heart that she is in her wrong place ; 
that it is she who ought to worship 
the man, and not the man her ; and 
when she becomes properly conscious 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 45 

of her destiny, has not he a right to be 
conscious of his ? 

^^ Two Years Ago.''^ 



February 16th. 
To a true woman, the mere fact of 
a man's being her husband, put it on 
the lowest ground that you choose, is 
utterly sacred, divine, all powerful ; in 
the might of which she can conquer 
self in a way which is an everyday 
miracle ; and the man who does not 
feel about the mere fact of a woman's 
having given herself utterly to him, 
just what she herself feels about it, 
ought to be despised by all his fel- 
lows ; were it not that, in that case, 
it would be necessary to despise more 



46 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

human beings than is safe for the soul 

of any man. 

** Two Years Ago.^'' 

February 17th. 
If two married people will not tell 
each other in love what they ought, 
they will be sure to tell each other in 
anger what they ought not. 

'' Two Years Ago. ^^ 

February 18th. 
Monotony is pleasant in itself ; mor- 
ally pleasant, and morally useful. Mar- 
riage is monotonous ; but there is much 
to be said in favour of holy wedlock. I 
delight in that same monotony. It 
saves curiosity, anxiety, excitement, 
disappointment and a host of bad pas- 
sions. It gives a man the blessed in- 
vigorating feeling that he is at home : 



FROM CHARLES KINQSLEY. 47 

that he has roots, deep and wide, 
struck down into all he sees ; and that 
only the Being Who will do nothing 
cruel or useless can tear them up. 

^^ My Winter Garden.^ ^ 

February 19th. 
If there is one thing more provoking 
than another to a woman, it is to see 
her husband " Strass-engel, Haus-teu- 
fel," an angel of courtesy to every 
woman but herself ; to see him in so- 
ciety all smiles and good stories, the 
most amiable and self-restraining of 
men ; perhaps to be complimented on 
his agreeableness ; and to know all the 
while that he is penning up all the ac- 
cumulated ill-temper of the day, to let 
it out on her when they get home; 
perhaps in the very carriage as soon 



48 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

as it leaves the door. Hypocrites 
that you are, some of you gentle- 
men! 

** Two Years Ago.^^ 

February Wth. 
" No, No ; don't kiss me, for kisses 
will not make up for injustice." 

" Two Years Ago,^* 

February 21st. 
Eomantic? Extravagant? Yes; if 
the world be right in calling a passion 
romantic just in proportion as it is not 
merely hopeless, but pure and unsel- 
fish, drawing its delicious power from 
no hope or faintest desire of enjoy- 
ment, but merely from simple delight 
in its object. 

^^ Alton Locke," chap. vii. 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 49 

February Md. 

"Strange, how you women sit at 
home to love and suffer, while we 
men rush forth to break our hearts 
and yours against rocks of our own 
seeking. Ah well! were it not for 
Scripture, I should have thought that 
Adam, rather than Eve, had been the 
one who plucked the fruit of the for- 
bidden tree." 

" Westward Ho !'^ 

February ^3d, 

He had steeped his whole soul in old 
poetry, and especially in Spenser's 
Faery Queen. Good for him, had he 
followed every lesson which he might 
have learned out of that most noble 
of English books: but one lesson at 



50 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

least he learned from it ; and that was, 
to be chivalrous, tender, and courteous 
to all women, however old or ugly, 
simply because they were women. 

" Two Years Ago." 

February 2Jfth. 

Taught by a woman who loved him, 
he could listen to humiliating truths, 
which he would have sneered at, had 
they come from the lips of a hermit or 
a priest. Often he rebelled ; often he 
broke loose, and made her angry, and 
himself ashamed : but the spell was on 
him — a far surer, as well as purer spell 
than any love-potion — the only spell 
which can really civilize man — that of 
woman's tact and woman's purity. 

' * Hereward the Wake, ' ' chap. xii. 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 51 

February 25th. 
Who can — and who dare if he could 
— withdraw the sacred veil from those 
bitter agonies of inward shame and 
self-reproach, made all the more intense 
by his clear and undoubting knowledge 
that he was forgiven ? "What dread of 
punishment, what blank despair, could 
have pierced that great heart so deeply 
as did the thought that the God Whom 
he had hated and defied had returned 
him good for evil and rewarded him 
not according to his iniquities ? That 
discovery filled up the cup of his self- 
loathing. To have found at last the 
hated and dreaded name of God : and 
found that it was Love ! To possess 
Victoria, a living, human likeness, how- 
ever imperfect, of that God; and to 



52 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

possess in her a home, a duty, a pur- 
pose, a fresh clear life of righteous la- 
bour, perhaps of final victory. That was 
his punishment ; that was the brand of 
Cain upon his forehead ; and he felt it 
greater than he could bear. 

" J32/paiia," chap. XXX. 

February 26th. 

Why will two people, who have 
sworn to love and cherish each other 
utterly, and who, on the whole, do 
what they have sworn, behave to each 
other as they dare for very shame be- 
have to no one else. Is it that, as 
every beautiful thing has its hideous 
anti-type, this mutual shamelessness is 
the devil's ape of mutual confidence ? 

^^ Two Year8 Ago.^^ 



FROM CHARLES EINGSLEY. 53 

February 27th. 

Husband and wife were as busy as 
bees ; and yet any one accustomed to 
watch the little ins and outs of married 
life, could have seen that neither forgot 
for a moment that the other was in the 
room, but basked and purred, like two 
blissful cats, each in the sunshine of the 
other's presence. 

^^Two Years Ago,^^ chap. vii. 

February 28th. 

God forbid that those who have been 
true lovers on earth should contract 
new marriages in the next world. Love 
is eternal. Death may part lovers, but 
not Love. 

^' Alton Locke.'' 



MARCH. 



March 1st. 
" God dwells no more in books writ- 
ten with pens than in temples made 
with hands; and the sacrifice which 
pleases Him is not verse, but righteous- 
ness. Do you recollect, Queen Whims, 
what I wrote once in your album ? 

" ' Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever, 
Do noble things, not dream them, all day long, 
So making life, death, and that vast forever, 
One grand, sweet song.' " 

** Two Years Ago,'''' chap. xx. 

March M. 
" Better to be anxious for others than 
only for thyself. Better to have some- 
thing to love — even something to weep 
over — than to become in some lonely 



58 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

cavern thine own world, — perhaps as 
more than one whom I have known, 
thine own God." 

" JSy^a^wi," chap, xi, 

March 3d. 
" I say, that by fleeing into solitude 
a man cuts himself off from all which 
makes a Christian man; from law, 
obedience, fellow-help, self-sacrifice — 
from the communion of saints itself. 
How canst thou hold communion with 
those toward whom thou canst show 
no love ? And how canst thou show 
thy love but by works of love ? " 

" JBTj/rpaim," chap. xi. 

March Jfth. 
" He who cannot pray for his brothers 
whom he does see, and whose sins and 



FROM CHARLES KINQSLEY. 69 

temptations he knows, will pray but 
dully for his brothers whom he does 
not see, or for anything else. And he 
who will not labor for his brothers, 
the same will soon cease to pray for 
them, or love them either." 

*' JBjrpaiia," chap. xi. 



March 5th. 
Fool \ instead of laughing at the 
sacred words of the prophets, get up 
and obey them. 

*' Sypatittf" chap. vi. 

March 6th. 
" Do you, too, like the rest of man- 
kind, think no-belief better than mis- 
belief ; and smile on hypocrisy, lip-as- 



60 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

sent, practical Atheism, sooner than 
on the unpardonable sin of making a 
mistake? "Will you, like the rest of 
this wise world, let a man's spirit rot 
asleep into the pit, if he will only lie 
quiet and not disturb your smooth re- 
spectabilities ; but" if he dares, in wak- 
ing, to yawn in an unorthodox man- 
ner, knock him on the head at once, 
and * break the bruised reed,' and 
' quench the smoking flax ' ? And yet 
you churchgoers have 'renounced the 
world ' ! " 

** Feasf," chap. iii. 

March 7th. 
"*Why am I what I am, when I 
know more and more daily what I 
could be ? ' — That is the mystery ; and 



FBOM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 61 

my sins are the fruit, and not the root 
of it. Who will explain that ? " 

** Feasf," chap. iii. 

March 8th. 
And now the Church had conquered. 
The weak things of this world had 
confounded the strong. In spite of 
the devilish cruelties of persecutors ; 
in spite of the contaminating atmos- 
phere of sin which surrounded her ; in 
spite of having to form herself, not 
out of a race of pure and separate crea- 
tures, but by a most literal "new 
birth " out of those very fallen masses 
who insulted and persecuted her; in 
spite of having to endure within her- 
self continual outbursts of the evil 
passions in which her members had 



62 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

once indulged without check ; in spite 
of a thousand counterfeits which 
sprung up around her and within her, 
claiming to be parts of her, and allur- 
ing men to themselves by that very 
exclusiveness and party arrogance 
which disproved their claim; in spite 
of all, she had conquered. 

*^ Hypaiia," Preface, 

March 9th. 
He never spoke to a Christian ; and 
cut off thus from the outward " com- 
munion of saints," he found himself fast 
parting away from the inward one. 

*^ Hypatia,^^ chap. xiv. 

March 10th. 
" All at once, a thought struck me. 
*Why should I be a coward? Why 



FROM CHABLE8 KINGSLEY. 63 

should I be afraid of shafts, or devils, 
or hell, or anything else ? If I am a 
miserable sinner, there's One died for 
me — I owe Him love, not fear at all. 
I'll not be frightened into doing right 
— that's a rascally reason for repent- 



ance.' " 



" Yeast j^^ chap. xiii. 



March 11th, 
" I suppose that you would call this 
your conversion ? " 

" I should call it one, sir, because it 



was one." 



"Tell me now, honestly, did any 
real, practical change in your behavior 
take place after that night ? " 

" As much, sir, as if you put a soul 
into a hog, and told him that he was a 



64 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

gentleman's son ; and if, every time 
he remembered that, he got spirit 
enough to conquer his hoggishness, and 
behave like a man, till the hoggishness 
died out of him, and the manliness 
grew up and bore fruit in him, more 
and more each day." 

*' Yeastf^^ chap. xiii. 



March Mh. 
"Who is there among us to whom an 
oft-heard truth has not become a tire- 
some and superfluous commonplace, 
till one day it has flashed before us 
utterly new, indubitable, not to be 
disobeyed, written in letters of fire 
across the whole vault of heaven ! 

'* Two Years A go,^^ chap. xix. 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 65 

March 13th, 
" If you saw a man fallen into the 
water, what do you think would be 
the shortest way to prove to him that 
you had authority from heaven to pull 
him out ? Do you give it up ? Pull- 
ing him out, would it not be, without 
more ado ? " 

" Two Years Ago,^^ chap. x. 

March nth. 
" To tell you the truth, your sermon 
last Sunday puzzled me. I could not 
comprehend (on your showing) how 
Paul got that wonderful influence over 
those pagans which he evidently had ; 
and as how to get influence is a very 
favorite study of mine, I borrowed the 
book when I went home, and read for 



66 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

myself ; and the matter at last seemed 
clear enough, on Paul's own showing." 

"I don't doubt that; but I suspect 
your interpretation of the fact and 
mine would not agree." 

"Mine is simple enough. He says 
that what proved him to be an apostle 
was his power. He is continually ap- 
pealing to his power; and what can 
he mean by that, but that he could do, 
and had done, what he professed to 
do ? He promised to make those poor 
heathen rascals of Greeks better, and 
wiser, and happier men; and, I sup- 
pose, he made them so ; and then there 
was no doubt of his commission, or his 
authority, or anything else. He says 
himself he did not require any cre- 
dentials, for they were his credentials, 



FROM CHARLES KIN08LEY, 67 

read and known of every one ; he had 
made good men of them out of bad 
ones, and that was proof enough whose 
apostle he was." 

" Two Years Ago^'' chap. x. 

March 15th. 

Of "vital Christianity" I heard 

much; but, with all my efforts, could 

find out nothing. Indeed, it did not 

seem interesting enough to tempt me 

to find out much. 

^^ Alton LocJcCf^^ chap. i. 

March 16th. 
" Simply that it is the law of all earth 
and heaven, and Him who made them. 
That God is perfectly powerful, be- 
cause He is perfectly and infinitely of 
use ; and perfectly good, because He 



68 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

delights utterly and always in being 
of use; and that, therefore, we can 
become like God — as the very heathens 
felt that we can, and ought to become 
— only in proportion as we become of 
use. I did not see it once. I tried 
to be good, not knowing what good 
meant. I tried to be good, because I 
thought it would pay me in the world 
to come. But, at last, I saw that all 
life, all devotion, all piety, were only 
worth anything, only Divine, and God- 
like, and God-beloved, as they were 
means to that one end — to be of use." 
" Two Years Ago^^' chap. xix. 

March 17th. 
"It is a noble thought and all 
thoughts become clear in the light of 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 69 

it ; even that most difficult thougiit of 
all, which so often torments good peo- 
ple, when they feel, 'I ought to love 
God, and yet I do not love Him.' 
Easy to love Him, if one can once 
think of Him as the concentration, the 
ideal perfection of all which is most 
noble, admirable, lovely in human char- 
acter ! And easy to work, too, when 
one once feels that one is working for 
such a Being, and with such a Being 
as that ! The whole world round us, 
and the future of the world, too, seem 
full of light, even down to its murkiest 
and foulest depths, when we can but 
remember that great idea — An inJfi- 
nitely useful God over all, who is try- 
ing to make each of us useful in His 
place. If that be not the beatific vi- 



70 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

sion of which old mystics spoke so 
rapturously, one glimpse of which was 
perfect bliss, I at least know none 
nobler, desire none more blessed." 

" Two Years Ago,^^ chap. xix. 



March 18th. 
" Why will men so often impute to 
God the miseries which they bring 
upon themselves?" 

"Because their pride makes them 
more willing to confess themselves sin- 
ners than fools." 

** Yeast,^^ chap. xv. 

March 19th. 
Be sure that as long as you and yours 
make piety a synonym for unmanli- 



FBOM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 71 

ness, you will never convert either me 
or any other good sportsman. 

'* Feosi," chap. ii. 



March Wth. 
It is better sometimes not to settle 
in one's heart what we shall speak, 
for the Everlasting Will has good 
works ready prepared for us to walk 
in, by what we call fortunate accident ; 
and it shall be given us in that day 
and that hour what we shall speak. 

" Fccw^," chap. iii. 

March 2Ut. 
"Is it not because thou art still 
trusting in thyself, that thou dost re- 
gret the past, which shows thee that 



72 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

thou art not that which thou wouldst 
gladly pride thyself on being ? " 

^^ Hypatia,^^ chap, xi. 

March S^d. 
I want a faith past arguments ; one 
which, whether I can prove it or not 
to the satisfaction of the lawyers, I be- 
lieve to my own satisfaction, and act 
on it as undoubtingly and nnreason- 
ingly as I do upon my own newly re- 
discovered personal identity. I don't 
want to possess a faith. I want a 
faith which will possess me. And if I 
ever arrived at such a one, believe me, 
it would be by some such practical 
demonstration as this very tent has 
given me, within which I have seen 
you and your children lead a life of 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 73 

deeds as new to me, the Jew, as they 
would be to Hypatia the Gentile. 

^^Hypatia,^^ chap. xvii. 

March SSd. 
The Cause must find a man, and tak' 
hauld o' him, willy-nilly, and grow up 
in him like an inspiration, till he can 
see nocht but in the light o't. 

^^ Alton LockCy^^ chap. vii. 

March ^ith. 
To pray really, about a real sorrow, 
a real sin like this, was a thought 
which never entered her mind, and if 
it had, she would have driven it away 
again : just because the anxiety was so 
real, practical, human, it was a matter 
which had nothing to do with reli- 



74 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

gion; which it seemed impertinent — 
almost wrong — to lay before the 
throne of God. 

" Two Years Ago^^' chap, xix, 

March 25th. 

" You have begun at the right end, 
if you win the children, you win the 
mothers." 

"And if you win the mothers, the 
poor fathers must obey their wives, 
and follow in the wake." 

" Westward Ho!^^ chap, xxv, 

March mth. 

The best way to punish oneself for 

doing ill, seems to me to go and do 

good; and the best way to find out 

whether God means you well, is to 



FBOM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 75 

find out whether He will help you to 
do well. 

*' Westward Ho !" chap. xxv. 

March '27th, 
Many a man I have seen who, in his 
haste to fly from the fiends without 
him, has forgotten to close the door 
of his heart against worse fiends who 
were ready to harbor within him. 

"BjiTpafia," chap. xi. 

March 28th. 
If thou art weak or imperfect in thy 
work — He put thee here, because thou 
wert imperfect, that so that which has 
come to pass might come to pass ; and 
thou bearest thine own burden only — 
and yet not thou, but He who bore it 
for thee. 

"Hypaiiaj^^ chap. xi. 



76 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

March 29th. 
" What better can the Lord do for a 
man, than take him home when he has 
done his work ? " 

" But, Master Yeo, a sudden death ? " 
" And why not a sudden death. Sir 
John? Even fools long for a short 
life, and a merry one, and shall not 
the Lord's people pray for a short 
death and a merry one ? Let it come 
as it will to old Yeo ! " 

" Westward JTo / " chap, xxxii. 

March 30th. 
Goodness rather than talent had 
given her a wisdom, and goodness 
rather than courage a power of using 
that wisdom, which to those simple 
folk seemed almost an inspiration. 

** Two Years Ayo,*^ ohap. ii. 



FROM CEABLE8 KING8LEY. Tt 

March 31st. 
" My welfare ? It is gone ! " 
"So much the better. I never 
found mine till I lost it." 

*'Birpa<ia," chap, xxvii. 



APRIL. 



April 1st. 
"There! Behold our works! Us 
Greeks — us benighted heathens ! Look 
at it, and feel yourself what you are 
— a very small, conceited, ignorant 
young person, who fancies that your 
new religion gives you a right to de- 
spise every one else. Did Christians 
make all this ? Did Christians build 
that Pharos there on the left horn — 
wonder of the world ? Did Christians 
raise that mile-long mole which runs 
toward the land, with its two draw- 
bridges, connecting the two ports? 
Did Christians build this esplanade, or 
this gate of the Sun above our heads, 
or that Cassareum on our right here ? 



82 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

Look at those obelisks before it ! " 
and he pointed upward to those two 
world-famous ones, one of which still 
lies on its ancient site as Cleopatra's 
IN'eedle. " Look up, look up, I say, and 
feel small — very small indeed! Did 
Christians raise them, or engrave them 
from base to point with the wisdom of 
the ancients ? Did Christians build that 
Museum next to it, or design its stat- 
ues and its frescoes — now, alas! re- 
echoing no more to the hummings of 
the Attic bee ? Did they pile up out 
of the waves that palace beyond it, or 
that Exchange ? or fill that Temple of 
ISTeptune with breathing brass and 
blushing marble ? Did they build that 
Timonium on the point, where An- 
tony, worsted at Actium, forgot his 



FROM CHARLES KINQ8LEY, 83 

shame in Cleopatra's arms ? Did they 
quarry out that island of Antirrhodus 
into a nest of docks, or cover those 
waters with the sails of every nation 
under heaven? Speak, thou son of 
bats and moles — thou six feet of sand 
— thou mummy out of the cliff cav- 
erns! Can monks do works like 
these?" 

"JHypatta," chap. v. 

April 2d, 
The general intermixture of ideas, 
creeds, and races, even the mere phys- 
ical facilities for intercourse between 
different parts of the Empire, helped 
to give the great Christian fathers 
of the fourth and fifth centuries a 
breadth of observation, a depth of 



84 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

thought, a large-hearted and large- 
minded patience and tolerance, such 
as, we may say boldly, the Church has 
since beheld but rarely, and the world 
never; at least, if we are to judge 
those great men by what they had, 
and not by what they had not, and 
to believe, as we are bound, that had 
they lived now, and not then, they 
would have towered as far above the 
heads of this generation as they did 
above the heads of their own. 

^^Hypatia,^^ Preface. 

April 3d. 

Idolatry ? Do I worship the Pharos 

when I gaze at it, as I do for hours, 

with loving awe, as the token to me 

of the all-conquering might of Hellas ? 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 85 

Do I worship the roll on which 
Homer's words are written, where I 
welcome with delight the celestial 
truths which it unfolds to me, and 
even prize and love the material book 
for the sake of the message which it 
brings ? Do you fancy that any but 
the vulgar worship the image itself or 
dream that it can help or hear them ? 
Does the lover mistake his mistress's 
picture for the living, speaking reality. 
"We worship the idea of which the im- 
age is a symbol. Will you blame us 
because we use that symbol to repre- 
sent the idea to our own affections 
and emotions instead of leaving it a 
barren notion, a vague imagination of 
our own intellect ? 

^* ffypatia,^^ chap. xv. 



86 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

A;pril J/ih. 
The wise man does not quarrel with 
his creed for being disagreeable any 
more than he does with his finger for 
aching. 

"J3yjpa<»a," chap, ii. 



April 5th. 
Your practical man, poor wretch, will 
try to help this and that, and torment 
his soul with ways and means, and 
preventives and f orestallings ; your 
philosopher quietly says, It can't be 
helped. If it ought to be, it will be ; 
if it is, it ought to be. We did not 
make the world, and we are not re- 
sponsible for it. 

^^ Hypatia," chap. ii. 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 87 

April 6th. 

"What do I care for food! The 
inexpressible must be expressed, the 
work must be done if it cost me the 
squaring of the circle. How can he 
whose sphere lies above the stars, 
stoop every moment to earth ? " 

"Ay, and would that we could 
live without food, and imitate per- 
fectly the immortal gods. But while 
we are in this prison-house of mat- 
ter, we must wear our chain; even 
wear it gracefully, if we have the 
good taste; and make the base ne- 
cessities of this body of shame sym- 
bolic of the diviner food of the rea- 
son." 

" Eifpatia,^^ chap. ii. 



88 BEAUTIFUL TE0UGET8 

April 7th. 
" Bravo ! bravo ! O wonderful con- 
version ! Lancelot has at last discov- 
ered that, besides the * glorious Past,' 
there is a present worthy of his sub- 
lime notice! "We may now hope, in 
time, that he will discover the exist- 
ence of a Future ! " 

" YeaMf^ chap, iii. 



April 8th. 
" Farewell, queen of wisdom ! Your 
philosophy never shows to better ad- 
vantage than when you thus wisely 
and gracefully subordinate that which 
is beautiful in itself to that which is 
beautiful relatively and practically." 

" Eypatia,^ ' chap. xx. 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 89 

April 9th. 
What refuge, then, in self -education ; 
when a man feels himself powerless in 
the gripe of some unseen and inevi- 
table power, and knows not whether 
it be chance, or necessity, or a devour- 
ing fiend ? To wrap himself sternly 
in himself, and cry, "I will endure, 
though all the universe be against 
me ; " — how fine it sounds ! But who 
has done it ? Could a man do it per- 
fectly but for one moment, — could he 
absolutely and utterly for one moment 
isolate himself, and accept his own 
isolation as a fact, he were then and 
there a madman or a suicide. As it 
is, his nature, happily too weak for 
that desperate self-assertion, falls back 
recklessly on some form, more or less 



90 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

graceful, according to the tempera- 
ment of the ancient panacea, " Let us 
eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." 
Why should a man educate self, when 
he knows not whither he goes, what 
will befall him to-night ? 

" Two Years Ago^'' cbap. xxvi, 

April 10th. 
No. There is but one escape, one 
chink through which we may see light, 
one rock on which our feet may J&nd 
standing-place, even in the abyss : and 
that is the belief, intuitive, inspired, 
due neither to reasoning nor to study, 
that the billows are God's billows; 
and that though we go down to hell, 
He is there also ; — the belief that not 
we, but He, is educating us; that 
these seemingly fantastic and incoher- 



FROM CHARLES KIN08LEY 91 

ent miseries, storm following earth- 
quake, and earthquake fire, as if the 
caprice of all the demons were let 
loose against us, have in His mind a 
spiritual coherence, an organic unity 
and purpose (though we see it not); 
that sorrows do not come singly, only 
because He is making short work with 
our spirits ; and because the more 
effect He sees produced by one blow, 
the more swiftly He follows it up by 
another ; till, in one great and varied 
crisis, seemingly long to us, but short 
enough compared with immortality, 
our spirits may be — 

" Heated hot with burning fears, 
And bathed in baths of hissing tears, 
And battered with the strokes of doom, 
To shape and use." 

" Two Years AgOy^^ chap. xxvi. 



92 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

April 11th, 
How do I know that they would do 
it ? What possible proof is there that 
if a two-legged phantasm pokes a hard 
iron-grey phantasm in among my sen- 
sations, those sensations will be my 
last ? Is the fact of my turning pale, 
and lying still, and being in a day or 
two converted into crow's flesh, any 
reason why I should not feel? And 
how do I know that would happen ? 

" Hypatittf" chap. xiii. 

April 12th. 
" It is by pictures and music, by art 
and song, and symbolic representations, 
that all nations have been educated in 
their adolescence ! and as the youth of 
the individual is exactly analogous to 



FEOM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 93 

the youth of the collective race, we 
should employ the same means of in- 
struction with our children which suc- 
ceeded in the early ages with the whole 
world." 

" Yeastf^^ chap. vi. 



April 13th. 
A certain great divine, and a very 
clever divine was he, called him a reg- 
ular Sadducee; and probably he was 
quite right. Whereon, the professor, 
in return, called him a regular Phari- 
see ; and probably he was quite right 
too. But they did not quarrel in the 
least; for, when men are men of the 
world, hard words run off them like 
water off a duck's back. . . . What 



94 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

aa advantage it is to be men of the 
world. 

" The Water Bdbies,^^ chap. iv. 



April Ufth, 
He was a logician, and therefore 
ought to have known that he could not 
prove a universal negative. 

*' The Water Babies,^ ^ chap. iv. 



April 15ih, 
Every man sees facts through nar- 
row spectacles, red, or green, or blue, 
as his nature or his temperament col- 
ors them : and he is quite right, only 
he must allow us the liberty of having 
our spectacles too. 

*' Yeojsl" chap, x. 



FROM CHARLES KINOSLEY. 95 

A^ril 16th. 
Authority is only good for proving 
facts. We must draw our own con- 
clusions. 

*' Fc(M<," cbap. X. 

April 17th, 
The professor had not the least no- 
tion of allowing that things were true, 
merely because people thought them 
beautiful. For at that rate, he said, 
the Baltas would be quite right in 
thinking it a fine thing to eat their 
grandpapas, because they thought it an 
ugly thing to put them underground. 
The professor, indeed, went furthei-, 
and held that no man was forced to 
believe anything to be true, but what 
he could see, hear, taste, or handle. 

" The Water Babies^^ cbap. iv. 



96 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

April 18th. 
The reality of philosophy has died 
long ago, but the great ones find it 
still worth their while to worship its 
shadow. 

" Hypatia,''^ chap. vii. 

April 19th, 
It is a wide world, my little man — 
and thank heaven for it, for else, be- 
tween crinolines and theories, some of 
us would get squashed — and plenty of 
room in it for fairies, without people 
seeing them; unless, of course, they 
look in the right place. 

*• The Water Babies,^ ^ chap. ii. 

April Wth. 
The most wonderful and the strong- 
est things in the world are just the 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 97 

things which no one can see. There is 
life in you ; and it is the life in you 
which makes you grow, and move, and 
think : and yet you can't see it. And 
there is steam in a steam-engine ; and 
that is what makes it move : and yet 
you can't see it ; and so there may be 
fairies in the world, and they may be 
just what makes the world go round to 
the old tune of 

C^est Vamour, V amour, Vamour 
Qui fait e monde d, la ronde : 

And yet no one may be able to see 
them except those whose hearts are 
going round to that same tune. 

** The Water Bdbies,^^ chap. ii. 

April 21st. 
" Contrary to nature." 
"Well, but, my dear little man, you 



98 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

must learn to talk about such things, 
when you grow older, in a very differ- 
ent way from that. You must not 
talk about " ain't " and " can't " when 
you speak of this great wonderful world 
round you, of which the wisest man 
knows only the very smallest corner, 
and is, as the great Sir Isaac isTewton 
said, only a child picking up pebbles on 
the shore of a boundless ocean. 

" The Water Bahies,^^ chap. ii. 

You must not say that this cannot 
be, or that that is contrary to !N"ature. 
You do not know what E'ature is, or 
what she can do. . . . Wise men 
are afraid to say that there is anything 
contrary to nature, except what is con- 



FBOM CEABLE8 KINQ8LET. 99 

trary to mathematical truth ; for two 
and two cannot make five, and two 
straight lines cannot join twice, and a 
part cannot be as great as the whole, 
and so on (at least, so it seems at pres- 
ent) : but the wiser men are, the less 
they talk about " cannot." 

" Th£ Water Bdbies^^^ chap. ii. 

Ajpril 23d, 
Folks' fancy that such and such 
things cannot be, simply because they 
have not seen them, is worth no more 
than a savage's fancy that there can- 
not be such a thing as a locomotive, 
because he never saw one running wild 
in a forest. Wise men know that their 
business is to examine what is, and not 
to settle what is not. 

" The Water Babies,*^ chap. ii. 

;LoFc. 



100 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

April 2Jfth. 
Instead of fancying, with some peo- 
ple, that your body makes y our soul, as 
if a steam-engine could make its own 
coke ; or, with some people, that your 
soul has nothing to do with your body, 
but is only stuck into it like a pin into 
a pincushion, to fall out with the first 
shake ; you will believe that your soul 
makes your body, just as a snail makes 

his shell. 

** The Water Babies,^ ^ chap. iii. 

April '25th. 
He was a very great naturalist. . 
. . Only one fault he had, which cock- 
robins have likewise — that, when any 
one else found a curious worm, he would 
hop round them, and peck them, and 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 101 

set up his tail, and bristle up his feath- 
ers, just as a cock-robin would; and 
declare that he found the worm first ; 
and that it was his worm ; and, if not, 
that then it was not a worm at all. 

" The Water Babies,^ ^ chap, iv, 

April ^6th. 
Folk say now that I can make beasts 
into men, by circumstance, and selec- 
tion, and competition, and so forth. 
"Well, perhaps they are right ; and per- 
haps, again, they are wrong. . . . 
At all events, it is no concern of theirs. 
Whatever their ancestors were, men 
they are ; and I advise them to behave 
as such, and act accordingly. But let 
them recollect this, that there are two 
sides to every question, and a down- 



102 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

hill as well as an uphill road ; and, if 
I can turn beasts into men, I can, by 
the same laws of circumstance, and 
selection, and competition, turn men 
into beasts. 

*• TAe Water Babies,'^ chap. vi. 

April 27th, 
A fool is many times too strong for 
a wise man, by virtue of his thick hide. 

'* Westward Ho!" chap. i. 

April 28th. 
To the philosopher none enters 
without money. 

'* Hppatia," chap. vii. 

April 29th. 
Smile, if you will: but those were 
days (and there were never less super- 



FROM CHARLES KINQ8LEY. 103 

stitious ones) in which Englishmen be- 
lieved in the living God, and were not 
ashamed to acknowledge, as a matter 
of course, His help and providence, 
and calling, in the matters of daily 
life, which we now in our covert Athe- 
ism term " secular and carnal." 

" Westward So,' ^^ chap, ii, 

Aj>ril SOth, 
I have tried to hint to you two op- 
posite sorts of men. The one trying 
to be good with all his might and 
main, according to certain approved 
methods and rules, which he has got 
by heart ; and, like a weak oarsman, 
feeling and fingering his spiritual 
muscles over all day, to see if they are 
growing. The other, not even know- 



104 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

ing whether he is good or not, but just 
doing the right thing without thinking 
about it, as simply as a little child, be- 
cause the Spirit of God is with him. 
If you cannot see the great gulf fixed 
between the two, I trust that you will 

discover it some day. 

" Westward Ho!^* chap. iii. 



MAY. 



May 1st. 
" My book is the whole creation ly- 
ing open before me wherein I can read 
whensoever I please, the Word of 
God." 

^^Hypatia^^^ chap, xi. 

May ^d. 
" I may speak as a philosopher, or as 
a heathen, for ought I know: yet it 
seems to me that, as they say, the half 
loaf is better than none ; that the wise 
man will make the best of what he has 
and throw away no lesson because the 
book is somewhat torn and soiled. The 
earth teaches me thus far already. 
Shall I shut my eyes to those invisible 



108 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

things of God which are clearly mani- 
fested by the things which are made, 
because some day they will be more 
clearly manifested than now ? " 

^^ Hypatia,^^ chap. xi. 



May 3d. 
If there be a God, these trees and 
stones, these beasts and birds must be 
His will, whatever else is not. My 
body, and brain, and faculties, and 
appetites must be His will, whatever 
else is not. "Whatsoever I can do with 
them in accordance with the constitu- 
tion of them and nature must be His 
will, whatever else is not. Those laws 
of nature must reveal Him, and be 
revealed by Him, whatever else is not. 



FE03I CHARLES KIN08LEY. 109 

Man's scientific conquest of nature 
must be one phase of His kingdom on 
earth, whatever else is not. I don't 
deny that there are spiritual laws 
which man is meant to obey — How 
can I, who feel in my own daily and 
inexplicable unhappiness the fruits of 
having broken them ? — But I do say, 
that those spiritual laws must be in 
perfect harmony with every fresh 
physical law which we discover : that 
they cannot be intended to compete 
self -destructively with each other ; that 
the spiritual cannot be intended to be 
perfected by ignoring or crushing the 
physical, unless God is a deceiver, and 
His universe a self-contradiction. And 
by this test alone will I try all theories, 
and dogmas, and spiritualities whatso- 



110 BEAUTIF^^L THOUGHTS 

ever — Are they in accordance with 
the laws of nature ? 

** Fcas<," chap. ti. 

May Ifth. 
It is a righteous instinct which bids 
us welcome and honor beauty, whether 
in man or woman, as something of real 
work- — divine, heavenly, ay, though we 
know not how, in a most deep sense 
Eternal ; which makes our reason give 
the lie to all merely logical and senti- 
mental maunderings of moralists about 
" the fleeting hues of this our painted 
clay" ; and tell men, as the old Hebrew 
Scriptures told them, that physical 
beauty is the deepest of all spiritual 
symbols; and that though beauty 
without discretion be the jewel of 



FBOM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 111 

gold in the sinner's snout, yet the 
jewel of gold it is still, the sacrament 
of an inward beautj, which ought to 
be, perhaps hereafter may be, fulfilled 
in spirit and in truth. 

^^ffypatia,^^ chap. xxvi. 

May 5th. 
Yes. The mind of man is not so 
" infinite," in the vulgar sense of that 
word, as people fancy; and however 
greedy the appetite for wonder may 
be, while it remains unsatisfied in 
everyday European life, it is as easily 
satiated as any other appetite, and 
then leaves the senses of its possessor 
as dull as those of a city gourmand 
after a Lord Mayor's feast. Only the 
highest minds — our Humboldts, and 



112 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

Bonplands, and Schomburghs (and 
they only when quickened to an 
almost unhealthy activity by civiliza- 
tion) — can go on long appreciating 
where Nature is insatiable, imperious, 
maddening, in her demands on our 
admiration. The very power of ob- 
serving wears out under the rush of 
ever-new objects ; and the dizzy spec- 
tator is fain at last to shut the eyes of 
his soul, and take refuge (as West 
Indian Spaniards do) in tobacco and 
stupidity. The man, too, who has not 
only eyes but utterance — what shall he 
do where all words fail him ? Super- 
latives are but inarticulate, after all, 
and give no pictures even of size any 
more than do numbers of feet and 
yards : and yet what else can we do, 



FBOM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 113 

but heap superlative on superlative, 
and cr J, " "Wonderful, wonderful ! and 
after that wonderful, past all whoop- 
ing"? 

" Westward Ho!''^ chap, xxiii. 

May 6th. 
I brought home wild flowers and 
chance beetles and butterflies, and 
pored over them, not in the spirit of a 
naturalist, but of a poet. They were 
to me God's angels, shining in coats of 
mail and fairy masquerading dresses. 
I envied them their beauty, their free- 
dom. 

^^AUon LocJce,^* chap. i. 

May 7th, 
"The spinning- jenny and the rail- 
road, Cunard's liners and the electric 



114 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

telegraph, are to me, if not to you, 
signs that we are, on some points at 
least, in harmony with the universe; 
that there is a mighty spirit working 
among us, who cannot be your anarchic 
and destroying Devil, and therefore 
may be the Ordering and Creating 
God.'' 

" Yeast,^'' chap. v. 

May 8th. 
For nature among the mountains is 
too fierce, too strong for man. He 
cannot conquer her, and she awes him. 
He cannot dig down the cliffs, or chain 
the storm-blasts ; and his fear of them 
takes bodily shape : he begins to people 
bhe weird places of the earth with weird 
beings, and sees nixies in the dark linns 



FROM CHARLES KING8LEY. 115 

as he fishes by night, dwarfs in the 
caves where he digs, half-trembling, 
morsels of iron and copper for his 
weapons, witches and demons on the 
snow-blast which overwhelms his herd 
and his hut, and in the dark clouds 
which brood on the untrodden moun- 
tain peak. He lives in fear : and yet, 
if he be a valiant-hearted man, his 
fears do him little harm. They may 
break out, at times, in witch-manias, 
with all their horrible suspicions, and 
thus breed cruelty, which is the child 
of fear : but on the whole they rather 
produce in man thoughtfulness, rever- 
ence, a sense, confused yet precious, of 
the boundless importance of the unseen 
world. His superstitions develop his 
imagination ; the moving accidents of 



116 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

a wild life call out in him sympathy 
and pathos ; and the mountaineer be- 
comes instinctively a poet. 

^^Hereward the Wake,^^ Prelude. 

May 9th. 
Like many young men at his crisis of 
life, he had given himself up to the 
mere contemplation of IS'ature till he 
had become her slave ; and now a lus- 
cious scene, a singing bird, were 
enough to allure his mind away from 
the most earnest and awful thoughts. 
He tried to think, but the river would 

not let him. 

" Yeast^^^ chap. iii. 

May 10th. 
Clouds are water, and so are rain- 
bows ; and clouds are angels' thrones, 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 117 

and rainbows the signs of God's peace 

on earth. 

" Westward Ho ! " chap, iv. 



May 11th. 
" And do you forget, Gary, that the 
more fair this passing world of time, 
by so much the more fair is that eter- 
nal world, whereof all here is but a 
shadow and a dream ; by so much the 
more fair is He before whose throne 
the four mystic beasts, the substantial 
ideas of IS^ature and her powers, stand 
day and night, crying, 'Holy, holy, 
holy. Lord God of hosts. Thou hast 
made all things, and for Thy pleasure 
they are and were created ! ' My 
friends, if He be so prodigal of His 
own glory as to have decked these 



118 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

lonely shores, all but unknown since 
the foundation of the world, with 
splendors beyond all our dreams, what 
must be the glory of His face itself ! " 

" Westward Ho f"* chap. xix. 

May mh. 
" You are a great deal wiser than 
me, I know ; but I can't abide to see 
you turn up your nose as it were at 
God's good earth. See now, God made 
all these things ; and never a man, per- 
haps, set eyes on them till fifty years 
agone ; and yet they were as pretty as 
they are now, ever since the making of 
the world. And why do you think 
God could have put them here, then, 
but to please Himself" — and Amyas 
took off his hat — "with the sight of 



FBOM CEABLES KINGSLEY. 119 

them? ]N'ow, I say what's good 
enough to please God, is good enough 
to please you and me." 

" Westward Ho!" chap. xvii. 

May 13th. 
Are Englishmen hedge-gnats, who 
only take their sport when the sun 
shines ? Is it not, on the contrary, 
symbolical of our national character 
that almost all our field amusements 
are wintry ones? Our fowling, our 
hunting, our punt-shooting (pastime for 
Hymir himself and the frost giants) — 
our golf and skating, — our very cricket, 
and boat-racing, and jack and grayling 
fishing, carried on till we are fairly 
frozen out. Wq are a stern people, 
and winter suits us. Nature then re- 



120 BEAUTIFUL THOUOHTS 

tires modestly into the background, 
and spares us the obtrusive glitter of 
summer, leaving us to think and work ; 
and therefore it happens that in Eng- 
land it may be taken as a general rule 
that whenever all the rest of the world 
is indoors we are out and busy, and on 
the whole, the worse the day, the bet- 
ter the deed. 

" rca3<,"chap. i. 

May Uth, 
Is it not a grand thought, the silence 
and permanence of Nature amid the 
perpetual flux and noise of human 
life ? — a grand thought that one gen- 
eration goeth, and another cometh, 
and the earth abideth forever ? 

" Two Years Ago,^* Introduction. 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 121 

May 15th. 
They who ascribe miraculous power 
to dead men's bones ; who make tem- 
ples of charnel-houses, and bow before 
the images of the meanest of man- 
kind, have surely no right to accuse of 
idolatry the Greek or the Egyptian, 
who embodies in a form of symbolic 
beauty ideas beyond the reach of 

words. 

"jHjrpa^ta," chap. xv. 



May 16th. 
It was a fine world in the Brunes- 
wald. What was it then outside ? JSTot 
to him, as to us, a world circular, 
round, circumscribed, mapped, botan- 
ized, zoologized; a tiny planet about 



122 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

which everybody knows, or thinks 
they know, everything; but a world 
infinite, magical, supernatural — be- 
cause unknown; a vast flat plain 
reaching no one knew whence or 
where, save that the mountains stood 
on the four corners thereof to keep it 
steady^ and the four winds of heaven 
blew out of them ; and in the centre, 
which was to him the Bruneswald, such 
things as he saw : but beyond, things 
unspeakable — dragons, giants, rocs, 
ores, witch-whales, griffins, chimeras, 
satyrs, enchanters, Paynims, Saracen 
Emirs and Sultans, Kaisers of Con- 
stantinople, Kaisers of Ind and of 
Cathay, and beyond them again of 
lands as yet unknown. 

" Hereivard the Wake,^^ chap. i. 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 123 

May 17th. 
So they paced homeward, hand in 
hand, beside the shining ripples, along 
the Dinas shore. The birches breathed 
fragrance on them; the night-hawk 
churred softly round their path; the 
stately mountains smiled above them 
in the moonlight, and seemed to keep 
watch and ward over their love, and to 
shut out the noisy world, and the harsh 
babble and vain fashions of the town. 
The summer lightning flickered to the 
westward; but round them the rich 
soft night seemed full of love, — as full 
of love as their own hearts were, and, 
like them, brooding silently upon its 
joy. At last the walk was over ; the 
kind moon sank low behind the hills ; 
and the darkness hid their blushes as 



124 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

they paced into the sleeping village, 
and their hands parted unwillingly at 
last. 

" Two Years Ago,^^ chap, xx, 

Mwy 18th. 
" I want not beauty, but some beau- 
tiful thing — a woman, perhaps," and he 
sighed. " But at least a person — a liv- 
ing, loving person — all lovely itself, 
and giving loveliness to all things ! If 
I must have an ideal, let it be, for 
mercy's sake, a realized one." 

** Yeast f^ chap. iii. 

May 19th. 
The poet, I suppose, must be a seer 
as long as he is a worker, and a seer 
only. He has no time to philosophize 



FROM CHARLES KING8LEY. 125 

— to "think about thinking," as 
Goethe, I have somewhere read, says 
that he never could do. It is too often 
only in sickness and prostration and 
sheer despair, that the fierce voracity 
and swift digestion of his soul can 
cease, and give him time to know him- 
self and God's dealings with him ; and 
for that reason it is good for him, too, 
to have been afflicted. 

^^ Alton Locke,^^ chap, viii. 

May Wth, 
" But all this is so — so unpoetical." 
"Hech! Is there no the heeven 
above them there, and the hell beneath 
them? and God frowning, and the 
deevil grinning? JSTo poetry there! 
Is no the verra idea of the classic 



126 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

tragedy defined to be, man conquered 
by circumstance? Canna ye see it 
there? And the verra idea of the 
modern tragedy, man conquering cir- 
cumstance? — and I'll show ye that, 
too — in mony a garret where no eye 
but the gude God's enters, to see the 
patience, and the fortitude, and the 
self-sacrifice, and the luve stronger 
than death, that's shining in thae dark 
places o' the earth. Come wi' me, and 



see." 



^^ Alton Locke,'^ chap, viii. 



May 21st. 

"And I suppose poets' souls are 

worth something, like other people's — 

perhaps more. I can't understand 'em : 

but my Mary seems to, and people, like 



FROM CHARLES KINQSLEY. 127 

her, who think a poet the finest thing 
in the world. I laugh at it all when I 
am jolly, and call it sentiment and 
cant: but I believe that they are 
nearer heaven than I am : though I 
think they don't quite know where 
heaven is, nor where " (with a wicked 
wink, in spite of the sadness of his 
tone) — "where they themselves are 
either." 

*' Two Years Ago,^^ chap. xxv. 

May 22d, 
I do not complain that I am a Cock- 
ney. That, too, is God's gift. He 
made me one, that I might learn to 
feel for poor wretches who sit stifled 
in reeking garrets and work-rooms 
drinking in disease with every breath, 



128 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

— bound in their prison-house of brick 
and iron, with their own funeral pall 
hanging over them, in that canopy of 
fog and poisonous smoke, from their 
cradle to their grave. I have drank of 
the cup of which they drink. And so 
I have learned — if, indeed, I have 
learned — to be a poet — a poet of the 
people. 

^^ Alton Locke,^- chap. i. 

May ^3d. 
" If I paint a portrait, which I seldom 
do, I wish to make it such a one as the 
old masters aimed at — to give the sum 
total of the whole character ; traces of 
every emotion, if it were possible, and 
glances of every expression which 
have passed over it since it was born 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 129 

into the world. They are all here, 
the whole past and future of the man ; 
and every man, as the Mohammedans 
say, carries his destiny on his fore- 
head." 

'* Yeast^^^ chap. vii. 

May Hth' 
"Those old Greeks had a deep in- 
sight into nature, when they gave to 
each river not merely a name, but a 
semi-human personality, a river-god of 
its own. It may be but a collection of 
ever-changing atoms of water ; what is 
your body but a similar collection of 
atoms, decaying and renewing every 
moment ? Yet you are a person ; 
and is not the river, too, a person — a 
live thing? It has an individual 



130 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

countenance which you love, which you 
would recognize again, meet it where 
you will; it marks the whole land- 
scape; it determines probably the 
geography and the society of a whole 
district. It draws you, too, to itself 
by an indefinable mesmeric attraction. 
If you stop in a strange place, the first 
instinct of your idle half-hour is to 
lounge by the river. It is a person to 
you ; you call it — Scotchmen do, at 
least — she, and not it." 

*^ Tv)o Years Ago,^^ Introductory. 



May ^6th. 
History, poetry, science, I had been 
accustomed to hear spoken of as " car- 
nal learning, human philosophy," more 



FROM^CHABLES KINGSLEY. 131 

or less diabolic and ruinous to the soul. 
So, as usually happens in this life — 
"By the law was the knowledge of 
sin " — and unnatural restrictions on the 
development of the human spirit only 
associated with guilt of conscience, 
what ought to have been an innocent 
and necessary blessing. 

" Alton LockCf" chap, ii. 



May ^6th, 
EecoUect that he who wrote Arcadia 
was at the same time, in spite of his 
youth, one of the subtlest diplomatists 
of Europe ; that the poet of the Faery 
Queene was also the author of The 
State of Ireland; and if they shall 
quote against me with a sneer Lilly's 



132 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

Euphues itself, I shall only answer by 
asking — Have they ever read it ? For 
if they have done so, I pity them if 
they have not found it, in spite of oc- 
casional tediousness and pedantry, as 
brave, righteous, and pious a book as 
man need look into ; and wish for no 
better proof of the nobleness and 
virtue of the Elizabethan age, than the 
fact that Eujghues and the Arcadia 
were the two popular romances of the 
day. Let those who have not read 
Euphues believe that, if they could 
train a son after the fashion of his 
Ephoebus, to the great saving of their 
own money and his virtue, all fathers, 
even in these money-making days, 
would rise up and call them blessed. 
** Westward Ho!" chap. viii. 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 133 

May 27th. 
The only books which I knew were 
the Pilgrim's Progress and the Bible. 
The former was my Shakespeare, my 
Dante, my Yedas, by which I explained 
every fact and phenomenon of life. 
London was the City of Destruction, 
from which I was to flee ; I was Chris- 
tian ; the Wicket of the Way of Life I 
had strangely identified with the turn- 
pike at Battersea Bridge end ; and the 
rising ground of Mortlake and Wimble- 
don was the Land of Beulah — the En- 
chanted Mountains of the Shepherds. 
If I could once get there, I was saved : 
— a carnal view, perhaps, and a child- 
ish one ; but there was a dim meaning 
and human reality in it nevertheless. 

^*^ Alton Locke,^^ chap. i. 



134 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

May 28th. 
As in men, so in books, the soul is 
all with which our souls must deal; 
and the soul of the book is whatsoever 
beautiful, and true, and noble, we can 
find in it. It matters not to us 
whether the poet was altogether con- 
scious of the meanings which we can 
find in him. Consciously or uncon- 
sciously to him, the meanings must be 
there ; for were they not there to be 
seen, how could we see them ? 

**jHyj?a<ta," chap, viii. 

May 29th. 

I know no book, always excepting 

Milton, which at once so quickened 

and exalted my poetical view of man 

and his history, as that great prose 



FBOM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 135 

poem, the single epic of modern days, 
Thomas Carlyle's "French Eevolu- 
tion." Of the general effect which his 
works had on me, I shall say nothing : 
it was the same as they have had, 
thank God, on thousands of my class 
and of every other. But that book 
above all first recalled me to the over- 
whelming and yet ennobling knowl- 
edge that there was such a thing as 
Duty; first taught me to see in his- 
tory not the mere farce-tragedy of 
man's crimes and follies, but the deal- 
ings of a righteous Ruler of the uni- 
verse, whose ways are in the great 
deep, and whom the sins and errors, as 
well as the virtues and discoveries of 
man, must obey and justify. 

^^ Alton LockCy^* chap. ix. 



136 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

May 30th. 
Why is it that the latest poet has 
generally the greatest influence over 
the minds of the young ? Surely not 
for the mere charm of novelty ? The 
reason is that he, living amid the same 
hopes, the same temptations, the same 
sphere of observation as they, gives ut- 
terance and outward form to the very 
questions which, vague and wordless, 
have been exercising their hearts. 

' * Alton Locke, ' ' chap. ix. 



May 31st. 
And what endeared Tennyson espe- 
cially to me, the working man, was the 
altogether democratic tendency of his 
poems. True, all great poets are by 



FROM CHARLES KING8LEY. 137 

their office democrats ; seers of man 
only as man ; singers of the joys, the 
sorrows, the aspirations common to all 
humanity; but in Alfred Tennyson 
there is an element especially demo- 
cratic, truly leveling ; not his political 
opinions, about which I know nothing, 
and care less, but his handling of tlie 
trivial everyday sights and sounds of 
nature. Brought up in a part of Eng- 
land which possesses not much of the 
picturesque, and nothing of that which 
the vulgar call sublime, he has learned 
to see that in all nature, in the hedge- 
row and the sandbank, as well as in 
the Alp peak and the ocean waste, is a 
world of true sublimity, — a minute in- 
finite, — an ever-fertile garden of poetic 
images, the roots of which are in the 



138 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

unfathomable and the eternal, as truly 
as any phenomenon which astonishes 
and awes the eye. 

''^ Alton Locke,^^ chap. ix. 



JUNE. 



June 1st. 
When the Lord shows a man a 
thing, he can't well help seeing it. 

'* YmsA^''"' chap. iii. 

June ^d. 
Punished for our sins we surely are ; 
and yet how often they become our 
blessings, teaching us that which noth- 
ing else can teach us ! Nothing else ! 

One says so ! 

** Alton LocJce,^^ chap, ii, 

June 3d. 
A man kens just as much as he's 
taught himsel', and na mair. 

^^ Alton LocJce,^^ chap. iii. 



142 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

June Jfth. 
Sirrah ! those who cannot obey will 
never be fit to rule. If thou canst not 
keep discipline now, thou wilt never 
make a company or a crew keep it 
when thou art grown. 

" Westward Ho.'^' chap, ii, 

June 5th. 
His training had been that of the 
old Persians, " to speak the truth and 
to draw the bow," both of which sav- 
age virtues he had acquired to perfec- 
tion, as well as the equally savage 
ones of enduring pain cheerfully, and 
of believing it to be the finest thing in 
the world to be a gentleman; by 
which word he had been taught to un- 
derstand the careful habit of causing 



FBOM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 143 

needless pain to no human being, poor 
or rich, and of taking pride in giving 
up his own pleasure for the sake of 
those who were weaker than himself. 

*' Westward Ho ! " chap. i. 

June 6th. 
My young friend, you have been a 
little too much on the stilts heretofore. 
Take care that, now you are off them, 
you don't lie down and sleep, instead of 
walking honestly on your legs. Have 
faith in yourself; pick these men's 
brains, and all men's. You can do it. 

** Yeast^^^ chap. vi. 

June 7th. 
Ah, boy, boy— do ye think that 
was what ye were made for : to please 
yerseF wi' a woman's smiles, or e'en a 



144 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

woman's kisses — or to please yerseP at 
all? How do ye expect ever to be 
happy, or strong, or a man at a', as 
long as ye go on looking to enjoy yer- 
sel' — ^yerseP ? 

"Alton Locke" chap. vii. 

June 8th, 

" Happy man ! to have the strength 
of will which can thrust its thoughts 
away once and for all." 

ISTo! more happy are they whom 
God will not allow to thrust their 
thoughts from them till the bitter 
draught has done its work. 

*' Yeast,^^ chap. ii. 

June 9th. 
"Book-learning is not business ; book- 
learning didn't get me round the 



FB03I CHARLES KINGSLEY. 145 

world ; book-learning didn't make Cap- 
tain Hawkins, nor his father neither, 
the best shipbuilders from Hull to 
Cadiz ; and book-learning, I very much 
fear, won't plant ^Newfoundland." 

" Westward SoP' chap. xi. 

June 10th. 
" The best reward for having wrought 
well already, is to have more to do ; 
and he that has been faithful over a 
few things, must find his account in 
being made ruler over many things. 
That is the true and heroical rest, 
which only is worthy of gentlemen 
and sons of God. As for those who, 
either in this world or the world to 
come, look for idleness, and hope that 
God shall feed them with pleasant 



146 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

things, as it were with a spoon, Amyas, 
I count them cowards and base, even 
though they call themselves saints and 
elect." 

" Westward Ho!" chap. vii. 

June 11th. 

" He has yet to learn what losing his 
life to save it means. Bad men have 
taught him that it is the one great busi- 
ness of every one to save his own soul 
after he dies ; every one for himself ; and 
that that, and not divine self-sacrifice, 
is the one thing needful, and the bet- 
ter part which Mary chose." 

"I think men are inclined enough 
already to be selfish, without being 
taught that." 

" Eight, lad. For me, if I could 



FROM CHARLES KING8LEY. 147 

hang up such a teacher on high as an 
enemy of mankind, and a corrupter of 
youth, I would do it gladly. Is there 
not cowardice and self-seeking enough 
about the hearts of us fallen sons of 
Adam, that these false prophets, with 
their baits of heaven, and their terrors 
of hell, must exalt our dirtiest vices 
into heavenly virtues and the means of 
bliss ? 

" Westward Ho!^^ cbap. vii. 



June 12th. 
The sweetness of the apple, the po- 
tency of the grape, as the chemists tell 
us, are born out of acidity — a developed 
sourness. 

"Alton Locke,^^ eliap, iv. 



148 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

June 13th. 
" Friend, when I was still a heathen, I 
recollect well how I used to haggle at 
that story of the cursing of the fig- 
tree ; but when I learned to know what 
man was, and that I had been all my 
life mistaking for a part of nature that 
race which was originally, and can be 
again, made in the likeness of God, 
then I began to see that it were well if 
every fig-tree upon earth were cursed, 
if the spirit of one man could be taught 
thereby a single lesson." 

" Hypatia^^'* chap, xxi. 



June nth, 
" "What better thing can happen to a 
fool, than that God should teach him 



FBOM CHARLES KINQSLEY. 149 

that he is one, when he fancied him- 
self the wisest of the wise ? Listen to 
me, sir. Four months ago I was 
blessed with health, honor, lands, 
friends — all for which the heart of man 
could wish. And if, for an insane am- 
bition, I have chosen to risk all those, 
against the solemn warnings of the 
truest friend, and the wisest saint who 
treads this earth of God's — should I not 
rejoice to have it proved to me, even 
by such a lesson as this, that the friend 
who never deceived me before was 
right in this case too; and that the 
God who has checked and turned me 
for forty years of wild toil and war- 
fare, whenever I dared to do what was 
right in the sight of my own eyes, 
has not forgotten me yet, or given 



150 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 



up the thankless task of my educa- 

tiou?" 

^'Hypatia,^^ chap. xiii. 

June 15ih. 
To be bold against the enemy is 
common to the brutes; but the pre- 
rogative of a man is to be bold against 

himself. 

" Westward Ho ! " chap. i. 

June 16th. 
"I must — I must see the world; I 
must see the great mother-church in 
Alexandria, and the patriarch, and his 
clergy. If they can serve God in the 
city, why not I ? I could do more for 
God there than here. . . . ISTot that I 
despise this work — not that I am un- 
grateful to you — oh, never, never that ! 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 151 

— but I pant for the battle. Let me 
go ! I am not discontented with you, 
but with myself. I know that obedi- 
ence is noble; but danger is nobler 
still. If you have seen the world, why 

should not I?" 

'*jBry2>a<ta," chap, i, 

June 17th, 
God bless ye, my bairn ; gang hame, 
and mind your mither, or it's little 
gude looks '11 do ye. 

''^ Alton hockey"* chap. iii. 

June 18th, 
It is better discipline for a man, in 
many ways, to find things for himself 
than to have them put into his hands. 

" Two Years Ago^^^ chap, xv. 



152 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

June 19th. 
Danger is a better schoolmaster than 
all your new model schools, diagrams, 
and scientific apparatus. It made our 
forefathers the masters of the sea, 
though they never heard of popular 
science ; and I dare say couldn't, ono 
out of ten of them, spell their own 
names. 

'* Two Years Ago,^^ chap. iv. 

June Wth. 
Keserved knowledge is always re- 
served strength. 

" Hypatia,^* chap. xix. 

June 21st, 
"True, you may have a scruple of 
conscience as to the lawfulness of al- 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 153 

lowing a sin which you might prevent. 
To me it seems that the sin lies in the 
will rather than in the deed, and that 
sometimes — I only say sometimes — it 
may be a means of saving the sinner 
to allow his root of iniquity to bear 
fruit, and fill him with his own de- 
vices." 

" Dangerous doctrine, my father." 
"Like all sound doctrine — a savor 
of life or of death, according as it is re- 
ceived. I have not said it to the mul- 
titude, but to a discerning brother." 

**Bj(pa<ia," chap. xix. 

June 2M. 
If a thing be true, let it lead where 
it will, for it leads where God wills. 

^^ JEypatia,^^ chap. xi. 



154 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

June ^3d. 
Desultory reading is the bane o' 
lads. Ye maun begin with self-re- 
straint and method, my man, gin ye 
intend to gie yoursel' a liberal educa- 
tion. 

^^ Alton Locke,^^ chap. iii. 

June 2Jfth. 
Be natural, and you will be gentle- 
manlike. If you wish others to forget 
your rank, do not forget it yourself. 
If you wish others to remember you 
with pleasure, forget yourself, and be 
just what God has made you. 

^^ Alton LocJce,^^ chap. xv. 

June '25tk, 
Let off ? That would be a very bad 
thing for me, unless I become a very 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY 155 

different man from what I have been 
as yet. I am always right glad now 
to get a fall whenever I make a stum- 
ble. I should have gone to sleep in 
my tracks long ago else, as one used 
to do in the backwoods on a long elk- 
hunt. 

** Two Years Ago," chap, xviii. 

June 26th. 
His self-dependence, and his self-will 
too, crushed, or rather laid to sleep, by 
the discipline of the Laura, had started 
into wild life, and gave him a myste- 
rious pleasure which he had not felt 
since he was a disobedient little boy, 
of doing what he chose, right or 
wrong, simply because he chose it. 
Such moments come to every free 



156 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

willed creature. Happy are those 
who have not, like poor Philammon, 
been kept by a hotbed cultivation 
from knowing how to face them. 
But he had yet to learn, or rather 
his tutors had to learn, that the sure 
path toward willing obedience and 
manful self-restraint, lies not through 
slavery, but through liberty. 

^^ Hi/patia,^^ chap. ix. 



June ^7tL 
In the stupid old times, children 
were taught to know one thing, and 
to know it well ; but in these enlight- 
ened new times they are taught to 
know a little about everything, and 
to know it all ill ; which is great deal 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 157 

pleasanter and easier, and therefore 

quite right. 

" The Water Bdbies,^^ chap, iv, 

June 28th. 
It is not good for little boys to be 
told everything, and never to be 
forced to use their own wits. They 
would learn, then, no more than they 
do at Dr. Dulcimer's famous suburban 
establishment for the idler members 
of the youthful aristocracy, where the 
masters learn the lessons and the boys 
hear them — which saves a great deal 
of trouble — for the time being. 

^\The Water Babies,^ ^ chap. v. 

June 29th. 
There was a wise old heathen once, 
who said, " Maxima debetur pueris rev- 



158 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

erentia " — The greatest reverence is 
due to children; that is, that grown 
people should never say or do any- 
thing wrong before children, lest they 
should set them a bad example. — 
Cousin Cramchild says it means, " The 
greatest respectfulness is expected 
from little boys." But he was raised 
in a country where little boys are not 
expected to be respectful, because all 
of them are as good as the President : 
— Well, every one knows his own con- 
cerns best ; so perhaps they are. 

'' The Water Babies,'* chap, iv, 

June 30th. 
Some people interpret that in a 
more strange, curious, one-sided, left- 
handed, topsy-turvy, inside-out, behind- 



FROM CHARLES KINQ8LEY, 159 

before fashion than even Cousin Cram- 
child; for they make it mean, that 
you must show your respect for chil- 
dren, by never confessing yourself in 
the wrong to them, even if you know 
that you are so, lest they should lose 
confidence in their elders. 

" The Water BaMea," cbap. iv. 



JULY. 



July 1st. 
"It seems strange to complain of 
prosperity, but I sometimes regret 
that in America there is so little 
room for the very highest virtues; 
all are so well off that one never 
needs to give ; and what a man does 
here for others, they do for them- 
selves." 

** Two Years Ago^^ chap. i. 

July 2d. 
" The old Jew used to say of his na- 
tion, *It is God that hath made us, 
and not we ourselves.' "We say, ' It 
is we that have made ourselves, while 
God ' — Ah, yes ; I recollect. God's 
work is to save a soul here and a soul 



164 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

there, and to leave America to be 
saved by the Americans who made 
it. "We must have a broader and 
deeper creed than that if we are to 
work out our destiny." 

" Two Years AgOy^"* chap, xxiii. 

July 3d. 
They are true republicans, these 
hoodies, who do every one just what he 
likes, and make other people do so too. 

" The Water Babies,^' chap. vii. 

July Ifth, 
" Ashamed of you ? I often wish I 
could make Americans understand the 
feeling of England to you — the honest 
pride, as of a mother who has brought 
into the world the biggest baby that 



FB03I CHARLES KINGSLEY, 165 

ever this earth beheld, and is rather 
proud of its stamping about and beat- 
ing her in its pretty pets. Only the 
old lady does get a little cross when 
she hears you talk of the wrongs 
which you have endured from her, and 
teaching your children to hate us as 
their ancient oppressors, on the ground 
of a foolish war, of which every Eng- 
lishman is utterly ashamed, and in the 
result of which he glories really as 
much as you do." 

" Two Years AgOj^^ chap. i. 

July 5th. 

The English sailor was then, as now, 

a quite amphibious and all-cunning 

animal, capable of turning his hand to 

everything, from needle work and car- 



166 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

pentry to gunnery or hand-to-hand 
blows ; and he was, moreover, one of a 
nation, every citizen of which was not 
merely permitted to carry arms, but 
compelled by law to practice from 
childhood the use of the bow, and ac- 
customed to consider sword-play and 
quarter-staff as a necessary part and 
parcel of education, and the pastime of 
every leisure hour. The "fiercest na- 
tion upon earth," as they were then 
called, and the freest also, each man 
of them fought for himself with the 
self-help and self-respect of a Yankee 
ranger, and once bidden to do his 
work, was trusted to carry it out by 
his own wit as best he could. In one 
word, he was a free man. 

" Westward Ho!^^ chap, i. 



FBOM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 167 

July 6th. 
"Like all noble races, the Cornish 
owe their nobleness to the impurity of 
their blood — to its perpetual loans from 
foreign veins. See how the serpentine 
curve of his nose, his long nostril and 
protruding sharp-cut lips mark his 
share of Phoenician or Jewish blood ! 
how JSTorse, again, that same-shaped 
forehead ! how Celtic those dark curls, 
that restless grey eye with its * swin- 
den blicken ' like Yon Troneg Hagen's 
in the Niebelungen Lied ! " 

"Fcasi," chap iii. 

July 7th. 
But those old Jewish heroes did fill 
my whole heart and soul. I learned 
from them lessons which I never wish 



168 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

to unlearn. "Whatever else I saw 
about them, this I saw, — that thej 
were patriots, deliverers from that 
tyranny and injustice from which the 
child's heart, — "child of the devil" 
though you may call him, — instinct- 
ively, and, as I believe, by a divine in- 
spiration, revolts. Moses leading his 
people out of Egypt; Gideon, Barak, 
and Samson slaying their oppressors ; 
David, hiding in the mountains from 
the tyrant, with his little band of those 
who had fled from the oppressions of 
an aristocracy of JS'abals ; Jehu, exe- 
cuting God's vengeance on the kings — 
they were my heroes, my models ; 
they mixed themselves up with the 
dim legends about the Reformation 
martyrs, Cromwell and Hampden, Sid- 



FROM CHARLES KINQSLEY. 169 

ney and Monmouth, which I had heard 
at my mother's knee. 

^* Alton Locke,^^ chap, i. 



July 8th, 
By those curt and surly utterances 
did Tardrew, in true British bulldog 
fashion, express a repentance too deep 
for words; too deep for all confes- 
sionals, penances, and emotions or acts 
of contrition; the repentance not of 
the excitable and theatric southern, 
unstable as water, even in his most 
violent remorse : but of the still, deep- 
hearted northern, whose pride breaks 
slowly and silently, but breaks once 
for all ; who tells to God what he will 
never tell to man ; and having told it, 



170 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

is a new creature from that day forth 
forever. 

** Two Years Ago,^^ chap, xviii. 

tluly 9th. 
The stupid valor of the Englishman 
never knows when it is beaten ; and 
sometimes, by that self-satisfied igno- 
rance, succeeds in not being beaten 
after all. 

^^ Hereward the Wake,^* chap, xxxiv. 

July 10th. 
" Men can be just as original now as 
ever, if they had but the courage, even 
the insight. Heroic souls in old times 
had no more opportunities than we 
have; but they used them. There 
were daring deeds to be done then — 



FROM CHARLES KINOSLEY. 171 

are there none now ? Sacrifices to be 
made — are there none now ? "Wrongs 
to be redressed — are there none now ? 
Let any one set his heart, in these 
days, to. do what is right, and nothing 
else ; and it will not be long ere his 
brow is stamped with all that goes to 
make up the heroical expression — with 
noble indignation, noble self-restraint, 
great hopes, great sorrows; perhaps, 
even, with the print of the martyr's 
crown of thorns." 

" Tivo Years Ago,^* chap. vii. 



July 11th. 
"I do it because I like it. It's a 
sort of sporting with your true doctor. 
He blazes away at a disease where he 



172 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

sees one, as he would at a bear or a 
lion ; the very sight of it excites his 
organ of destructiveness. Don't you 
understand me? You hate sin, you 
know. Well, I hate disease. Moral 
evil is your devil, and physical evil is 
mine. I hate it, little or big ; I hate 
to see a fellow sick ; I hate to see a 
child rickety and pale ; I hate to see a 
speck of dirt in the street ; I hate to 
see a woman's gown torn ; I hate to 
see her stockings down at heel ; I hate 
to see anything wasted, anything 
awry, anything going wrong ; I hate 
to see water-power wasted, manure 
wasted, land wasted, muscle wasted, 
pluck wasted, brains wasted ; I hate 
neglect, incapacity, idleness, ignorance, 
and all the disease and misery which 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 173 

spring out of that. There's my devil ; 
and I can't help, for the life of me, 
going right at his throat, wheresoever 
I meet him ! " 

" Two Years Ago^*^ chap xiv. 



July mh. 
You must expect to be beat a few 
times in your life, little man, if you 
live such a life as a man ought to live, 
let you be as strong and healthy as you 
may ; and when you are, you will find 
it a very ugly feeling. I hope that 
that day you may have a stout, staunch 
friend by you who is not beat ; for, if 
you have not, you had best lie where 
you are, and wait for better times. 

" TJie Water BaJ}ies,*^ chap. ii. 



174 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

July 13th. 
I know ... an officer with a pair of 
grey moustaches as long as your arm, 
who said once in company that two of 
the most heartrending sights in the 
world, which moved him most to 
tears, which he would do anything 
to prevent or remedy, were a child 
over a broken toy and a child steal- 
ing sweets. The company did not 
laugh at him; his moustaches were 
too long and too grey for that: but, 
after he was gone, they called him 
sentimental and so forth, all but one 
dear little old Quaker lady with a 
soul as white as her cap, who was not, 
of course, generally partial to sol- 
diers; and she said very quietly, like 
a Quaker ; 



FROM CHARLES KINQSLEY. 175 

" Friends, it is borne upon my mind 
that that is a truly brave man." 

" The Water Babies,'^ chap. vi. 

July IJfth. 
For the first time in his life, he felt 
how comfortable it was to have noth- 
ing on him but himself. But he only 
enjoyed it: he did not know it, or 
think about it : just as you enjoy life 
and health, and yet never think about 
being alive and healthy; and may it 
be long before you have to think about 
it. 

*' The Water Babies,^ ^ chap. iii. 

July 15th. 
The mind of the savage, crushed by 
the sight of the white man's superior 



176 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

skill, and wealth, and wisdom, loses at 
first its self-respect; while his body, 
pampered with easily-obtained luxuries, 
instead of having to win the necessaries 
of life by heavy toil, loses its self -help- 
fulness ; and with self-respect and self- 
help vanish all the savage virtues, few 
and flimsy as they are, and the down- 
ward road toward begging and stealing, 
sottishness and idleness, is easy, if not 
sure. 

, " Westward Ho!*^ chap, xxvii. 



July 16th. 
What a snare a decently good nick- 
name is ! Out it must come, though it 
carry a lie on its back. 

** Feosi," chap, ii. 



FBOM CHARLES KINQ8LEY, 177 

July 17th. 

"Why does one admire a soldier? 
Kot for his epaulettes and red coat, but 
because one knows that, coxcomb 
though he be at home here, there is 
the power in him of that same self- 
sacrifice; that, when he is called, he 
will go and die, that he may be of 
use to his country. And yet — it may 
seem invidious to say so just now — 
but there are other sorts of self-sacri- 
fice, less showy, but even more beau- 
tiful." 

" "What can a man do more than die 
for his countrymen ? " 

"Live for them. It is a longer 
work, and therefore a more difficult and 
a nobler one." 

*' Two Years Ago,^* cbap. xix. 



178 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

July 18th. 
A manservant, a soldier, and a Jesuit 
are to me the three great wonders of 
humanity — three forms of moral sui- 
cide, for which I never had the slight- 
est gleam of sympathy, or even com- 
prehension. 

^^ Alton LockCj^^ chap, xv, 

July 19th. 
"Nature says, * after dinner sit 
awhile ' ; and even the dumb animals 
hear her voice, and lie by for a siesta 
when their stomachs are full. Grace 
says, * Jump up and rush out the mo- 
ment you have swallowed your food ; 
and if you get an indigestion, abuse 
poor Nature for it, and lay the blame 
on Adam's fall.' " 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 179 

" You are irreverent, my good sir, as 
usual; but you are unjust also this 
time." 

" Two Years Ago, ' ' chap, x, 
JulyWth. 

Her opinions were mere hearsays, 
picked up at her own will and fancy ; 
while his were living, daily-growing 
ideas. Her mind was beside his as the 
vase of cut flowers by the side of the 
rugged tree, whose roots are feeding 
deep in the mother earth. 

*' Fccwf," chap. X, 

July 21st. 
Wise and gallant gentleman, lovely 
to all good men, awful to all bad men ; 
in whose presence none dare say or do 



180 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

a mean or a ribald thing ; whom brave 
men left, feeling themselves nerved to 
do their duty better, while cowards 
slipped away, as bats and owls before 
the sun. 

" Westward Hof^ chap, i, 

" If a man living in civilized society 
has one right which he can demand it 
is this, that the State which exists by 
his labor shall enable him to develop, 
or, at least, not hinder his developing, 
his whole faculties to their very ut- 
most, however lofty that may be. 
While a man who might be an author 
remains a spade-drudge, or a journey- 
man while he has capacities for a mas- 
ter ; while any man able to rise in life 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 181 

remains by social circumstances lower 
than lie is willing to place himself, that 
man has a right to complain of the 
State's injustice and neglect." 

" Yeast^^ chap. vi. 

July 23d. 
"I think honestly," said Lancelot, 
whose blood was up, " that we gentle- 
men all run into the same fallacy. We 
fancy ourselves the fixed and neces- 
sary element in society, to which all 
others are to accommodate themselves. 
* Given the rights of the few rich, to 
find the condition of the many poor.' 
It seems to me that other postulate is 
quite as fair : * Given the rights of the 
many poor, to find the condition of 
the few rich.' " 

" Feosf," chap. vi. 



182 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

July '2Iith. 
" Pretty baby I am, to get fright- 
ened, at my time of life, because I find 
myself in a dark wood — and the sun 
shining all the while as jollily as ever 
away there in the west ! It is morn- 
ing somewhere or other now, and it 
will be morning here again to-morrow. 
* Good times and bad times, and all 
times pass over.' " 

" Two Years Ago,^^ chap. i. 

July ^5th. 
Though Aaron may be an altogether 
inspired preacher, yet it is only slow- 
tongued, practical Moses, whose spokes- 
man he is, who can deliver Israel from 
their taskmasters. 

" Two Years Ago,^^ chap. i. 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 183 

July 26th, 
" If we all were to pay for our own 
follies, or lie down and die when we 
saw them coming full cry at our heels, 
where would any one of us be by now ? 
I have been a fool in my time, young 
gentleman, more than once or twice ; 
and that too when I was old enough 
to be your father ; and down I went, 
and deserved what I got : but my rule 
always was — Fight fair ; fall soft ; 
know when youVe got enough; and 
don't cry out when you've got it : but 
just go home ; train again ; and say — 
better luck next fight." 

" Two Years Ago" chap. xxv. 

July mtJi. 
I don't believe this bishop is a bad 



184 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

man, but those who use rogues must 
expect to be called rogues. 

^^Hypatia,^^ chap. vii. 

July ^8th. 
Ah, the old story — of preventing 
scandals by retaining them, and fancy- 
ing that sin is a less evil than a little 
noise ; as if the worst of scandals was 
not the being discovered in hushing 
up a scandal. 

*^ Hypatia,^^ chap. vii. 

July 29th. 
Her grim, withered features grew 
softer, purer, grander; and rose en- 
nobled, for a moment, to their long- 
lost might-have-been, to that personal 
idea which every soul brings with it 



FROM CHARLES KING8LEY. 185 

into the world, which shines, dim and 
potential, in the face of every sleeping 
babe, before it has been scarred, and 
distorted, and encrusted in the long 
tragedy of life. 

" Hypatia,^* chap. xix. 

July 30th, 
Ah, first thoughts are best, and a 
body's heart '11 guide them right, if 
they will but hearken to it. 

" The Water Babies,^ ^ chap, ii. 

July 31st. 
If I can be as good a brute animal 
as my dog there — it being first demon- 
strated that it is good to be good — I 
shall be very well content. 

*^ Hypatia^^^ chap. xiii. 



AUGUST. 



August 1st 
It is all very well for a man to talk 
of conquering his appetites when he 
has none to conquer. Try and con- 
quer your organ of veneration, or of 
benevolence, or of calculation — then I 
will call you an ascetic. 

" Fcas^," chap. ii. 

August '2d, 
Every man believes just what it 
suits him to believe. Don't fancy that 
men reason themselves into convic- 
tions; the prejudices and feelings of 
their hearts give them some idea or 
theory, and then they find facts at 
their leisure to prove their theory true. 

•' Yemt^'*'' chap. x. 



190 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

August 3d, 

Cursing leaves him, as it leaves other 
men, very much where he had started. 

" Two Years Ago,^^ chap. xv. 



August Jftli, 
I*m a great liar often myseP, spe- 
cially when I'm praying. 

** Alton hockey'^ chap. Tii. 



August 5th. 
Mighty is Envy always, and mighty 
Ignorance ; but you become aware of 
their truly Titanic grandeur only when 
you attempt to touch their owner's 
pocket. 

*' Two Tears Ago,^' chap. xiv. 



FBOM CSABLES KINQSLEY, 191 

August 6th, 
I'm not in the habit of speaking 
without deliberation, for it saves a 
man a great deal of trouble in chang- 
ing his mind. 

** Alton LockCf^^ chap, iii. 



August 7th, 

" I never bet." 

" Then you do well. It is a foolish 
and a dirty trick ; playing with edge 
tools, and cutting one's own fingers." 

•• Two Years Ago,*^ chap. xiv. 



August 8th. 
The only virtue I ever possessed (if 
virtue it be) is the power of absorbing 
my whole heart and mind in the pur- 



192 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

suit of the moment, however dull or 
trivial, if there be good reason why it 
should be pursued at all. 

^^ Alton Locke," chap. vii. 



August 9th, 
What a long way it was to Crow- 
land. How wearying were the hours 
through mere and ea. How wearying 
the monotonous pulse of the oars. If 
Tobacco had been known then, Here- 
ward would have smoked all the way, 
and been none the wiser, though the 
happier, for it ; for the herb that drives 
away the evil spirits of anxiety, drives 
away also the good, though stern, 
spirits of remorse. 

^* Hereward the TFafce," chap, xxxvi. 



FBOM CHARLES KINGSLET, 193 

August 10th. 
The very genius, which too often 
makes its possessor self-indulgent in 
common matters, from the intense ca- 
pability for enjoyment which it brings, 
may also, when once his whole being 
is stirred into motion by some great 
object, transform him into a hero. 

'* Fecw/," chap. xiv. 

August 11th, 
Habits soon grow sleepy. 

' * Hypatia, ' ' chap, xiv, 

August IMh. 

Pleasure? is there any pleasure in 

feeling one's self at death-grips with 

the devil? I had given up believing 

in him for many a year. . . . And 



194 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

behold, the moment that I awaken to 
anything noble and right, I find the 
old serpent live and strong at my 
throat ! 

"JBj(pa<ta," chap. xxi. 

August 13th. 
To tell you truth, I can stand all 
temptations — in moderation, that is — 
save an' except the chance o' cleiking 
a fish. 

** Two Years Ago,^^ chap. xix. 

August IJith. 
Many a man I have seen, who in his 
haste to fly from the fiends without 
him, has forgotten to close the door 
of his heart against worse fiends who 
were ready to harbor within him. 

*^ Hypatia,*' chap. xli. 



FBOM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 195 

August 15th. 
" Such self-conceit — and heaven 
knows we have the root of it in our- 
selves also — is the very daughter of 
self-will, and of that loud crying out 
about I, and me, and mine, which is 
the very bird-call for all devils, and 
the broad road which leads to death." 
* * Westward jBTo / " chap, i, 

August 16th, 
A great shaking of hands ensued ; 
Amyas gripping with a great round 
fist, and a quiet quiver thereof, as 
much as to say, "I am glad to see 
you"; and Eustace pinching hard with 
quite straight fingers, and sawing the 
air violently up and down, as much as 
to say, ^^ DonH you see how glad I am 



196 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

to see you ? " A very different greet- 
ing from the former. 

" Westward Ho I ' ' chap. iii. 

August 17th. 
A keeper is only a poacher turned 
outside in, and a poacher a keeper 
turned inside out. 

** The Water Babies f^^ chap, i, 

August 18th. 
He was always fancying that the 
end of the world was come, when 
anything happened which was farther 
off than the end of his own nose. 

" The Water Babies,^ ^ chap. i. 

August 19th. 
He was too like some other little 
boys, very fond of hunting and tor- 
menting creatures for mere sport. 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 197 

Some people say that boys cannot 
help it ; that it is nature, and only a 
proof that we are all originally de- 
scended from beasts of prey. But 
whether it is nature or not, little boys 
can help it, and must help it. For if 
they have naughty, low, mischievous 
tricks in their nature, as monkeys have, 
that is no reason why they should give 
way to those tricks like monkeys, who 
know no better. And therefore they 
must not torment dumb creatures ; for 
if they do, a certain old lady who is 
coming will surely give them exactly 
what they deserve. 

** The Water Babies,^ ^ cbap. iii. 

August Wth. 
The water-fairies were very sorry to 



198 BEA UTIFUL THOUQHTS 

see him so unhappy, and longed to 
take him, and tell him how naughty 
he was, and teach him to be good, and 
to play and romp with him too: but 
they had been forbidden to do that. 
Tom had to learn his lesson for him- 
self by sound and sharp experience, as 
many another foolish person has to 
do, though there may be many a kind 
heart yearning over them all the while, 
and longing to teach them what they 
can only teach themselves. 

*' The Water BabieSf*^ chap. iii. 

August ^Ist 

Salmon are all true gentlemen, and, 

like true gentlemen, they look noble 

and proud enough, and yet, like true 

gentlemen, they never harm or quarrel 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 199 

with any one, but go about their own 
business, and leave rude fellows to 
themselves. 

" The Water Bcibies^^^ chap. iii. 

August ^M. 
No enemies are so bitter against 
each other as those who are of the 
same race; and a salmon looks on a 
trout, as some great folks look on some 
little folks, as something just too much 
like himself to be tolerated. 

" The Water Babiea,^^ chap. iii. 

August S3d, 

People who make up their minds to 

go and see the world, as Tom did, 

must needs find it a weary journey. 

Lucky for them if they do not lose 



200 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

heart and stop half-way, instead of 
going on bravely to the end as Tom 
did. For then they will remain neither 
boys nor men, neither fish, flesh, nor 
good red herring : having learned a 
great deal too much, and yet not 
enough ; and sown their wild oats, 
without having the advantage of reap- 
ing them. 

" The Water Bdbies^''^ chap. iv. 

Axigxist ^4th. 
A very distinguished lobster he was ; 
for he had live barnacles on his claws, 
which is a great mark of distinction in 
lobsterdom, and no more to be bought 
for money than a good conscience or 
the Yictoria Cross. 

" The Water Babies,^'' chap, iv. 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 201 

August '25th, 
So she made Sir John write to the 
Times to conmiand the Chancellor of 
the Exchequer for the time being to 
put a tax on long words. The Chan- 
cellor of the Exchequer, being a 
scholar and a man of sense, jumped 
at the notion ; but when he brought in 
his bill, most of the Irish members, 
and some of the Scotch likewise, op- 
posed it most strongly, on the ground 
that in a free country no man was 
bound either to understand himself or 
to let others understand him. 

** The Water Babies,^ ^ chap. iv. 



August ^6th. 
"What, have you been naughty, and 



202 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

have they put you in the lock-up?" 
asked Tom. 

The lobster felt a little indignant at 
such a notion, but he was too much 
depressed in spirits to argue: so he 
only said, " I can't get out." 

" Why did you get in ? " 

"After that nasty piece of dead 
fish." He had thought it looked and 
smelt very nice when he was outside, 
and so it did, for a lobster : but now 
he turned round and abused it because 
he was angry with himself. 

" The Water Babies,^* chap, t, 

August ^7th. 
Experience is of very little good 
unless a man, or a lobster, has wit 
enough to make use of it. For a good 



FBOM CHARLES KINGSLET, 203 

many people, like old Polonius, have 
seen all the world, and yet remain 
little better than children after all. 

" The Water Babies,^ ^ chap. v. 

August 28 tk. 
Then, I have no doubt, he repented 
fully of all the said naughty things 
which he had done, and promised to 
mend his life, as too many do when 
they think they have no life left to 
mend. Whereby, as they fancy, they 
make a very cheap bargain. But the 
old fairy with the birch rod soon un- 
deceives them. 

" The Water Babies,^ ^ chap. v. 

Augitst 29th. 
"I did not know there was any 
harm in it," said Tom. 



204 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

" Then you know now. People con- 
tinually say that to me: but I tell 
them, if you don't know that fire 
burns, that is no reason that it should 
not burn you : and if you don't know 
that dirt breeds fever, that is no reason 
why the fevers should not kill you. 
The lobster did not know that there 
was any harm in getting into the 
lobster-pot ; but it caught him all the 
same. And so, if you don't know that 
things are wrong, that is no reason 
why you should not be punished for 
them; though not as much, not as 
much, my little man, as if you did 
know." 

** The Water Babies,^ ^ chap. v. 

August 30th, 
You may fancy that Tom was quite 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 205 

good, when he had everything that he 
could want or wish : but you would be 
very much mistaken. Being quite 
comfortable is a very good thing ; but 
it does not make people good. Indeed, 
it sometimes makes them naughty. 

** The Water Babies, ^^ chap. v. 

Aitgust 31st. 
He has won his spurs in the great 
battle, and become fit to go with you 
and be a man ; because he has done the 
thing he did not like. 

*' The Water Babies," chap, viii. 



SEPTEMBER. 



S&pteniber 1st. 
True, Providence having sent into 
the world about as many women as 
men, it may be difficult to keep out of 
their way altogether. Perhaps, too, 
Providence may have intended them 
to be of some use to that other sex, 
with whom it has so mixed them up. 
Don't argue, poor Philammon. 

^^Hypatia,^^ chap, v, 

Septemher 2d. 
They're a very unfathomable species 
are they women; and if they were 
taken out o' man, they took the best 
part o' Adam wi' them, and left us to 
shift with the worse. 

** Two Years Ago,''^ chap. xxiv. 



210 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

/September 3d, 
Women are strange things, and often 
tease most where they love most. 

^^ Hereward the IFafce," chap. iv. 



September 4,th. 
"When a woman has to trust a man 
not to betray her, and does trust him, 
she may soon find it not only easy, but 
necessary, to do more than trust him. 

** Two Years Ago" chap. xix. 



September Sth. 
By some blessed moral law, the sur- 
est way to make oneself love any hu- 
man being is to go and do him a kind* 
ness. 

** Two Years Ago,^^ chap, iv. 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 211 

September 6th, 
In every man, however frivolous, or 
even worthless, love calls up to the 
surface the real heroism, the real 
depth of character — all the more 
deep because common to poet and 
philosopher, guardsman and country- 
clad. 

" Two Years Ago,** cbap. vii. 



September 7th. 
Extreme need sometimes bestows on 
shyness a miraculous readiness — (else 
why, in the long run, do the shy men 
win the best wives ? which is a fact, 
and may be proved by statistics, at 
least as well as anything else can). 

'* Two Years Ago,^^ cbap. xvi. 



212 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

Sejpterriber 8th, 
"E'ever! If love means no more 
than that — if it is to be a mere deli- 
cate self-indulgence, worse than the 
brute's, because it requires the prostra- 
tion of nobler faculties, and a selfish- 
ness the more huge in proportion to 
the greatness of the soul which is 
crushed inward by it^ — then I will 
have none of it ! I have had my 
dream — ^yes! but it was of one who 
should be at once my teacher and my 
pupil, my debtor and my queen — who 
should lean on me, and yet support me 
— supply my defects, although with 
lesser light, as the old moon fills up 
the circle of the new — labor with me 
side by side in some great work — 
rising with me forever as I rose: 



FR03I CHARLES KINGSLET. 213 

— and this is the base substitute! 

ISTever ! " 

" Hypatia," chap. xxvi. 

September 9th, 
!N'one knew better than the Spaniard 
how much more fond women are, by 
the very law of their sex, of worship- 
ping than of being worshipped, and of 
obeying than of being obeyed; how 
their coyness, often their scorn, is but 
a mask to hide their consciousness of 
weakness ; and a mask, too, of which 
they themselves will often be the first 
to tire. 

' * Westward HoV chap. J^ii. 

September 10th. 
When I first began to love her, I 
bid good-bye to all dirty tricks ; for I 



214 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

had some one then for whom to keep 
myself clean. 

" Westward Ho!^^ chap. viii. 

September 11th, 
Let a man once make a woman un- 
derstand, or fancy, that he knows that 
he is nothing to her ; and confess 
boldly that there is a great gulf fixed 
between them, which he has no mind 
to bridge over : and then there is little 
that he may not say or do, for good or 
for evil. 

" Two Years Ago,^^ chajh xvi. 

September l^th. 
Oh, what fools they are who say 
that love is blind ! Blind ? He sees 
souls with God's own light ; not as 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 215 

they have become : but as they ought 
to become — can become — are already 
in the sight of Him Who made them. 

** Two Years AgOy^^ chap. xx. 

September ISth, 
In the light of his new love for 
Argemone, the whole human race 
seemed glorified, brought nearer, en- 
deared to him. So it must be. He 
had spoken of a law wider than he 
thought in his fancy, that the angels 
might learn love for all by love for an 
individual. Do we not all learn love 
so? Is it not the first touch of the 
mother's bosom which awakens in the 
infant's heart that spark of affection 
which is hereafter to spread itself out 
toward every human being, and to lose 



216 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

none of its devotion for its first object, 
as it expands itself to innumerable new 
ones ? Is it not by love, too — by look- 
ing into loving human eyes, by feeling 
the care of loving hands — that the in- 
fant first learns that there exist other 
beings beside itself ? — that everybody 
which it sees expresses a heart and 
will like its q>wn ? Be sure of it. 

*' Yeast,'' chap. Ti. 

September llfth. 
Be sure that to have found the key 
to one heart is to have found the key 
to all ; that truly to love is truly to 
know; and truly to love one is the 
first step toward truly loving all who 
bear the same flesh and blood with 
the beloved. Like children, we must 



FROM CHARLES KINQSLEY, 217 

dress up even our unseen future in 
stage properties borrowed from the 
tried and palpable present, ere we can 
look at it without horror. We fear 
and hate the utterly unknown, and it 
only. Even pain we hate only when 
we cannot Tcnow it ; when we can only 
feel it, without explaining it, and mak- 
ing it harmonize with our notions of 
our own deserts and destiny. And 
as for human beings, there surely it 
stands true, wherever else it may not, 
that all knowledge is love, and all love 
knowledge ; that even with the mean- 
est we cannot gain a glimpse into their 
inward trials and struggles, without 
an increase of sympathy and affe^^ 
tion. 

*' rcosf," chap. vi. 



218 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

Septewtber 16th. 

Has woman forgotten her mission — 

to look at the heart and have mercy, 

while cold man looks at the act and 

condemns ? 

" Yeast^^^ chap, iii, 

Septemler 16th» 
Oh, you have taught me priceless 
things. You have taught me Beauty 
is the sacrament of heaven, and Love 
its gate ; that that which is the most 
luscious is also the most pure. 

" Yeast,^^ chap. "vii. 

September 17tJi. 
Women will be tender-hearted, you 
know. They fight with their tongues, 
and we with our fists ; and then they 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 219 

fancy their weapons don't hurt — Ha ! 
ha! ha! 

** reosf," chap, ix. 



Sejptember 18th. 
Come home and pray, my child ; for 
there is no rest on earth than prayer 
for woman's heart. 

" Westward Ho!^^ chap. xxix. 

September 19th, 
" Ah," said she, smiling sadly, " even 
in the saddest woman's soul there 
linger snatches of old music, odors of 
flowers long dead and turned to dust 
— ^pleasant ghosts, which still keep her 
mind attuned to that which may be in 
others, though in her never more ; till 
she can hear her own wedding-hymn 



220 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

reechoed in the tones of every girl 
who loves, and sees her own wedding- 
torch relighted in the eyes of every 
bride." 

** Westward Ho t " chap. xxix. 

Se^terriber Wth. 
" It matters little for an old heart like 
mine, which has but one or two chords 
left whole, how soon it be broken alto- 
gether ; but a young heart is one of 
God's precious treasures, and suffers 
many a long pang in the breaking; 
and woe to them who despise Christ's 
little ones ! " 

** Westward Ho!^^ chap. xix. 

September ^Ist. 
Wheresoever a holy and a wise 



FEOM CHARLES KINQSLEY, 221 

woman speaks, a warrior need not be 
ashamed of listening. 

*' Eypatia^^* chap. xii. 

/September ^2d, 
How subtly Mr. Tennyson has em- 
bodied all this in The Princess, How 
he shows us the woman, when she 
takes her stand on the false masculine 
ground of intellect, working out her 
own moral punishment by destroying 
in herself the tender heart of flesh, 
which is either woman's highest bless- 
ing or her bitterest curse; how she 
loses all feminine sensibility to the 
under-current of feeling in us poor 
world-worn, case-hardened men, and 
falls from pride to sternness, from 

sternness to sheer inhumanity. 

" Yeast,^* chap. ii. 



222 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

Sej^tember 23d. 
"Amyas! Amyas!" quoth Frank, 
solemnly, " you know not what power 
over the soul has the native and 
God-given majesty of royalty (awful 
enough in itself), when to it is super- 
added the wisdom of the sage, and 
therewithal the tenderness of the 
woman. Had I my will, there should 
be in every realm not a salique, but 
an anti-salique law: whereby no 
kings, but only queens should rule 
mankind. Then would weakness and 
not power be to man the symbol of 
divinity ; love, and not cunning, would 
be the arbiter of every cause; and 
chivalry, not fear, the spring of all 
obedience." 

'* Westward HoT* chap. xvi. 



FROM CSABLE8 KINGSLEY, 223 

S&pteTYhber ^Jfth. 
"She is a grand woman. I never 
saw such a one, and I have seen many. 
There was a prophetess once, lived in 
an island in the Weser-stream — and 
when a man saw her, even before she 
spoke a word, one longed to crawl to 
her feet on all fours, and say, * There, 
tread on me ; I am not fit for you to 
wipe your feet upon.' And many a 
warrior did it. . . . Perhaps I may 
have done it myself, before now. . . . 
And this one is strangely like her. 
She would make a prince's wife, now." 

'*£[i(pa<wi," chap, xviii, 

S&pterriber 25th, 
The unselfish adoration with which 
a maiden may bow down before some 



224 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

strong and holy priest, or with which 
an enthusiastic boy may cling to the 
wise and tender matron, who, amid the 
turmoil of the world, and the pride of 
beauty, and the cares of wifehood, 
bends down to him with counsel and 
encouragement — earth knows no fairer 
bonds than these, save wedded love 
itself. 

"JTy^aWa," chap. xiv. 

September 26th. 
And now, at little past forty, she 
was left a widow : lovely still in face 
and figure ; and still more lovely from 
the divine calm which brooded, like 
the dove of peace and the Holy Spirit 
of God (which indeed it was), over 
every look, and word, and gesture ; a 



FROM CHARLES KIN08LEY. 225 

sweetness which had been ripened by 

storm, as well as by sunshine ; which 

this world had not given, and could 

not take away. 

" Westward fib / " chap. ii. 

September ^7th, 
How easy it is to buy the love of 
men ! Gold will not do it ; but there 
is a little angel, may be, in the corner 
of every man's eye, who is worth more 
than gold, and can do it free of all 
charges : unless a man drives him out, 
and " hates his brother ; and so walks 
in darkness ; not knowing whither he 
goeth," but running full butt against 
men's prejudices, and treading on their 
corns, till they knock him down in de- 
spair — and all just because he will not 



226 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

open his eyes, and use the light which 
comes by common human good-nature ! 

"Two Years Ago,^^ chap. xv. 

Bejptember 28th. 
My dear parents, when you shall 
have read this book, and considered 
the view of human relationships which 
is set forth in it, you will be at no loss 
to discover why I have dedicated it to 
you, as one paltry witness of a union 
and of a debt which, though they may 
seem to have begun with birth, and to 
have grown with your most loving ed- 
ucation, yet cannot die with death: 
but are spiritual, indefeasible, eternal 
in the heavens with that God from 
whom every fatherhood in heaven and 

earth is named. 

" Hypatia," Dedication. 



FBOM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 227 

SepteTTiber 29th, 
" A sister ! " "What mysterious vir- 
tue was there in that simple word, 
which made Philammon's brain reel 
and his heart throb madly ? A sister ! 
not merely a friend, an equal, a help- 
mate, given by God Himself for loving 
whom none, not even a monk, could 
blame him. ]^ot merely something 
delicate, weak, beautiful, — for of course 
she must be beautiful — whom he 
might cherish, guide, support, deliver, 
die for, and find death delicious. Yes 
— all that, and more than that, lay in 
the sacred word. For those divided 
and partial notions had flitted across 
his mind too rapidly to stir such pas- 
sion as moved him now ; even the hint 
of her sin and danger had been heard 



228 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

heedlessly, if heard at all. It was the 
word itself which bore its own spell to 
the heart of the fatherless and mother- 
less foundling, as he faced for the first 
time the deep, everlasting, divine re- 
ality of kindred. 

*'J32/2)afo*a," chap, xvi. 



/September SOth, 
A sister ! of his own flesh and blood 
— born of the same father, the same 
mother — his, his, forever ! How hol- 
low and fleeting seemed all " spiritual 
sonships," "spiritual daughterhoods," 
inventions of the changing fancy, the 
wayward will of man ! Arsenius — 
Pambo — ay, Hypatia herself — what 
were they to him now? Here was 



FROM CHARLES KING8LEY. 229 

a real relationship. ... A sister! 
What else was worth caring for upon 
earth ? 

" Hypatiay*^ chap, xvi. 



OCTOBER. 



October 1st 
Ay, Shelley's gran' ; always gran' : 
but Fact is grander — God and Satan 
are grander. All around ye, in every 
gin-shop and coster-monger's cellar, are 
God and Satan at death-grips ; every 
garret is a haill Paradise Lost or Para- 
dise Eegained. 

*' AUon Locke,^^ chap, viii. 



October 2d. 
Fox-hunting is an epitome of human, 
life. You chop or lose your first two 
or three : but keep up your pluck, and 
you '11 run into one before sundown. 

**^Two Years Ago,^^ chap, xxviii. 



234 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

October 3d. 
I never saw a man who could cut 
out his way across country who could 
not cut his way through better things 
when his turn came. 

" Yeast,^^ chap. ii. 

October Jfih. 
Every human being is a romance, a 
miracle to himself now ; and will ap- 
pear as one to all the world in That 
Day. 

" Yeast^^^ Epilogue. 



October 5th. 
The nineteenth year is a time of life 
at which self-will is apt to exhibit it- 
self in other people besides tailors. 

^^ Alton LocTce,^^ chap. v. 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 235 

October 6th. 
Philosophy is superfluous in a world 
where all are fools. 

*^ Eypatia,^^ chap. xiii. 



October 7tL 
' The heart knoweth its own bitter- 
ness, and a stranger intermeddleth 
not with its joy." So thought he as 
he knelt ; and so think I, too, know- 
ing that in the pettiest character there 
are unfathomable depths, which the 
poet, all-seeing though he may pre- 
tend to be, can never analyze, but 
must only dimly guess at, and still 
more dimly sketch them by the ac- 
tions which they beget. 

*^ ffypatia,*^ chap. i. 



236 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

October 8th. 
If the times be awful, I should be 
doing awful things in them. 

^^Hypatia,^^ chap, ii. 



October 9th. 
" Even if Fortune cannot take from 
me all things, yet what she can take 
she will. And yet of two things, at 
least, she shall not rob me — to prefer 
that which is best, and to succor the 
oppressed." 

**Byj9ai«a," chap, xxvii. 



October 10th. 
Importunate persons must take their 
chance of being well served. 

'•'' Hypatia^^'' chap, vii. 



FBOM CHARLES KINQ8LEY. 237 

October 11th. 

I don't speak evil of dignities, when 

I complain of the men who fill them 

badly, do I ? 

"Bjjpa^id," chap, vii, 

October mh. 

" The presumption of the young in 
this generation is growing insuffer- 
able." 

"So much the better. They put 

their elders on their mettle in the race 

of good works." 

" B2(pa/ta, " chap, vii, 

October 13th. 
"Youth is rash in promises, and 
rasher in forgetting them." 

^^ Hypatia,^^ chap. vii. 



238 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

October IJfth, 
"There are two ways of making 
oneself happy in this life; you can 
judge for yourself which is best. 
One is to do one's work like a man, 
and hum a tune, to keep one's spirits 
up ; the other is to let the work go to 
rack and ruin, and keep one's spirits 
up, if one is a gentleman, by a little 
too much brandy ; if one is a lady, by 
a little too much laudanum." 

" Two Years Ago,^^ cliap. tI. 

October 15th, 
" Hang good boys ! give me one who 
knows how to be naughty in the right 
place ; I wouldn't give sixpence for a 
good boy : I never was one myself, 
and have no faith in them. Give me 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 239 

the lad who has more steam up than 
he knows what to do with, and must 
needs blow off a little in larks. When 
once he settles down on the rail, it'll 
send him along as steady as a luggage- 
train. Did you never hear a locomo- 
tive puffing and roaring before it gets 
under way? well, that's what your 
boy is doing. Look at him now, with 
my poor little Molly." 

'* Two Years Ago,^' chap. i. 

Octoher 16th. 
He was a meeker man latterly than 
he used to be. As he said himself 
once, a better refiner than any whom 
he had on board had followed him 
close all the seas over, and purified him 
in the fire. And gold seven times 



240 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

tried he was when God, having done 
His work in him, took him home at 
last. 

" Westward Ho!" chap, xiii, 

October mh, 
" Then I followed the chase by mere 
nature and inclination. But now I 
know I have a right to follow it, be- 
cause it gives me endurance, prompt- 
ness, courage, self-control, as well as 
health and cheerfulness: and there- 
fore — Ah ! a fresh ostrich-track ! " 

"JSTyjpaita," chap. xxi. 

October 18th. 
Yerily, however important the mere 
animal lives of men may be, and ought 
to be, at times, in our eyes, they never 



FROM CHARLES KINQSLEY. 241 

have been so, to judge from floods and 
earthquakes, pestilence and storm, in 
the eyes or Him Who made and loves 
us all. It is a strange fact : better for 
us, instead of shutting our eyes to it, 
because it interferes with our modern 
tenderness of pain, to ask honestly 
what it means. 

^^Two Years Ago," chap. iv. 

October 19th. 
It has now become a mere com- 
monplace, the strange power which 
great crises, pestilences, famines, revo- 
lutions, invasions, have to call out in 
their highest power, for evil and for 
good alike, the passions and virtues of 
man ; how, during their stay, the most 
desperate recklessness, the most fero- 



242 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

cious crime, side by side with the most 
heroic and unexpected virtue, are fol- 
lowed generally by a collapse and a 
moral death, alike of virtue and of vice. 
We should explain this nowadays, and 
not ill, by saying that these crises put 
the human mind into a state of exalta- 
tion ; but the truest explanation, after 
all, lies in the old Bible belief, that in 
these times there goes abroad the un- 
quenchable fire of God, literally kin- 
dling up all men's hearts to the highest 
activity, and showing, by the light of 
their own strange deeds, the inmost re- 
cesses of their spirits, till those spirits 
burn down again, self-consumed, while 
the chaff and stubble are left as ashes, 
not valueless after all, as manure for 
some future crop j and the pure gold, 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 243 

if gold there be, alone remains be- 
hind. 

" Two Years Ago,^^ chap. xvii. 

October Wth, 
Life is meant for work, and not for 
ease ; to labor in danger and in dread, 
to do a little good ere the night comes, 
when no man can work; instead of 
trying to realize for oneself a Paradise ; 
not even Bunyan's shepherd-paradise, 
much less Fourier's casino-paradise ; 
and perhaps least of all, because most 
selfish and isolated of all, my own 
heart-paradise — the apotheosis of loaf- 
ing, as Claude calls it. 

" Two Years Ago,^^ chap, xxiii. 

October ^Ist. 
" One thing at least I have learne4. 



244 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

in all my experiments on poor human- 
ity — never to have seen a man do a 
wrong thing, without feeling that I 
could do the same in his place. I used 
to pride myself on that once, fool that 
I was, and call it comprehensiveness. 
I used to make it an excuse for sitting 
by, and seeing the devil have it all his 
own way, and call that toleration. I will 
see now whether I cannot turn the said 
knowledge to a better account, as com- 
mon sense, patience, and charity ; and 
yet do work of which neither I nor my 
country need be ashamed." 

*' Two Years Ago,^^ chap, xxiii. 

October md. 
He tried to feel content ; but he dare 
not. All before him was anxiety, un- 



FBOM CHARLES KING8LEY, 245 

certainty. He had cut himself adrift ; 
he was on the great stream. Whither 
would it lead him ? "Well — was it not 
the great stream ? Had not all man- 
kind, for all the ages, been floating on 
it? Or, was it but a desert river, 
dwindling away beneath the fiery sun, 
destined to lose itself a few miles on, 
among the arid sands ? 

" ffypatia,^^ chap. x. 

October 23d, 
Battles, (as soldiers know, and news- 
paper editors do not) are usually fought, 
not as they ought to be fought, but as 
they can be fought ; and while the lit- 
erary man is laying down the law at 
his desk as to how many troops should 
be moved here, and what rivers should 



246 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

be crossed there, and where the cavalry 
should have been brought up, and when 
the flank should have been turned, the 
wretched man who has to do the work 
finds the matter settled for him by 
pestilence, want of shoes, empty stom- 
achs, bad roads, heavy rains, hot suns, 
and a thousand other stern warriors 
who never show on paper. 

" Westward HoV* chap, ix, 

October ^th. 
" He will know better when he has 
outgrown this same callow trick of 
honesty, and learned of the great god- 
dess Detraction, how to show himself 
wiser than the wise, by pointing out to 
the world the fool's motley which peeps 
through the rents in the philosopher's 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 247 

cloak. Go to, lad ! slander thy equals, 
envy thy betters, pray for an eye which 
sees spots in every sun, and for a vul- 
ture's nose to scent carrion in every 
rose-bed. If thy friend win a battle, 
show that he has needlessly thrown 
away his men ; if he lose one, hint that 
he sold it ; if he rise to a place, argue 
favor ; if he fall from one, argue divine 
justice. Believe nothing, hope nothing, 
but endure all things, even to kicking, 
if aught may be got thereby ; so shalt 
thou be clothed in purple and fine linen, 
and sit in kings' palaces and fare sump- 
tuously every day." 

" And wake with Dives in the tor- 
ment," said Amyas. " Thank you for 
nothing. Captain." 

** Westward So r^ chap, ix. 



248 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

October ^5th, 
" It was indeed a temptation of Di- 
abolus, for he is by his very name the 
divider who sets man against man, and 
tempts one to care only for oneself, and 
forget kin and country, and duty and 
queen. But you have resisted him. 
Captain Leigh, like a true-born English- 
man, as you always are, and he has 
fled from you. But that is no reason 
why we should not flee from him too ; 
and so I think the sooner we are out of 
this place, and at work again, the bet- 
ter for all our souls." 

" Westward Ho ! " chap. xxiv. 

October '26th, 
" "We must beware of treachery." 
" We must beware of no such thing. 



FROM CHARLES KING8LEY, 249 

Have I not told you fifty times, that if 
they see that we trust them, they will 
trust us, and if they see that we suspect 
them, they will suspect us ? And when 
two parties are watching to see who 
strikes the first blow, they are sure to 
come to fisticuffs from mere dirty fear 
of each other." 

*' Westward Ho !^^ chap, xxiii. 

October mth, 

"Eemember, you may write about 
Fairyland, but he has seen it." 

" And so have others," said Spenser ; 
" it is not so far from any one of us. 
Wherever is Love and Loyalty, great 
purposes and lofty souls, even though 
in a hovel or a mine, there is Fairy- 
land." 

" Westward Ho!'''* chap, ix. 



250 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

October 28tL 
Consciousness is a dim candle — over 
a deep mine. 

" Fcosf," chap. ii. 



October '29th. 
One takes things as one finds them. 
It don't do to look too deeply into one's 
feelings. Like chemicals, the more you 
analyze them, the worse they smell. 

*' Two Years Ago^^'' chap. i. 



October 30th. 
I never heard a man yet begin to 
prate of his conscience, but I knew that 
he was about to do something more 
than ordinarily cruel or false. 

" Westward Ho ! " chap, vii. 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 251 

October 31st 
He and I were schoolfellows, though 
he was somewhat the younger; and 
many a good thrashing have I given 
him, and one cannot help having a 
tenderness for a man after that. 

** Westward So! " chap, v. 



NOVEMBER. 



Noiiember 1st. 
It was a " day of God." The earth 
lay like one great emerald, ringed and 
roofed with sapphire; blue sea, blue 
mountain, blue sky overhead. There 
she lay, not sleeping, but basking in 
her quiet Sabbath joy, as though her 
two great sisters of the sea and air had 
washed her weary limbs with holy 
tears, and purged away the stains of 
last week's sin and toil, and cooled her 
hot, worn forehead with their pure in- 
cense-breath, and folded her within 
their azure robes, and brooded over her 
with smiles of pitying love, till she 
smiled back in answer, and took heart 
and hope for next week's weary work. 

'* Thoo Years Ago,^^ chap, xiv. 



256 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

November 2d. 
The short light of the winter day is 
fading fast. Behind him is a leaping 
line of billows lashed into mist by the 
tempest. Beside him green foam- 
fringed columns are rushing up the 
black rocks, and falling again in a 
thousand cataracts of snow. Before 
him is the deep and sheltered bay: 
but it is not far up the bay that he and 
his can see ; for some four miles out at 
sea begins a sloping roof of thick grey 
cloud, which stretches over their heads, 
and up and far away inland, cutting 
the clifPs off at mid-height, hiding all 
the Kerry mountains, and darkening 
the hollows of the distant firths into 
the blackness of night. And under- 
neath that awful roof of whirling mist 



FROM CHABLES KINGSLEY. 257 

the storm is howling inland ever, 
sweeping before it the great foam- 
sponges, and the grey salt spray, till 
all the land is hazy, dim, and dun. 

" Westward Ho ! " chap, ix. 

WoveiTiher 3d. 
A truly English prospect. At one 
turn they could catch, over the west- 
ern walls, a glimpse of the blue ocean 
flecked with passing sails ; and at the 
next, spread far below them, range on 
range of fertile park, stately avenue, 
yellow autumn woodland, and purple 
heather moors, lapping over and over 
each other up the valley to the old 
British earthwork, which stood black 
and furze-grown on its conical peak; 
and standing out against the sky on 



258 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

the highest bank of hill which closed 
the valley to the east, the lofty tower 
of Kilkhampton church, rich with the 
monuments and offerings of five cen- 
turies of Grenviles. A yellow eastern 
haze hung soft over park, and wood, 
and moor; the red cattle lowed to 
each other as they stood brushing 
away the flies in the rivulet far below ; 
the colts in the horse-park close on their 
right whinnied as they played together, 
and their sires from the Queen's Park, 
on the opposite hill, answered them in 
fuller though fainter voices. A rutting 
stag made the still woodland rattle 
with his horse thunder, and a rival far 
up the valley gave back a trumpet note 
of defiance, and was himself defied 
from heathery brows which quivered 



FROM CHARLES KING8LEY. 259 

far away above, half seen through the 
veil of eastern mist. And close at 
home, upon the terrace before the 
house, amid romping spaniels, and 
golden-haired children, sat Lady Gren- 
vile herself, the beautiful St. Leger of 
Annery, the central jewel of that all 
glorious place, and looked down at her 
noble children, and then up at her 
more noble husband, and round at that 
broad paradise of the West, till life 
seemed too full of happiness, and 
heaven of light. 

" Westward Ho!^^ chap. vii. 

I^ovember Jfth. 
Outside the southwest wind blew 
fresh and strong, and the moonlight 
danced upon a thousand crests of foam ; 



260 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

but within the black jagged point 
which sheltered the town, the sea did 
but heave, in long oily swells of rolling 
silver, onward into the black shadow 
of the hills, within which the town 
and pier lay invisible, save where a 
twinkling light gave token of some 
lonely fisher's wife, watching the weary 
night through for the boat which 
would return with dawn. Here and 
there upon the sea, a black speck 
marked a herring-boat, drifting with 
its line of nets; and right off the 
mouth of the glen, Amyas saw, with a 
beating heart, a large two-masted ves- 
sel lying-to. Eagerly he looked up the 
glen, and listened ; but he heard noth- 
ing but the sweeping of the wind across 
the downs five hundred feet above, and 



FB03I CHARLES KINGSLEY, 261 

the sough of the waterfall upon the 
rocks below ; he saw nothing but the 
vast black sheets of oak-wood sloping 
up the narrow blue sky above, and the 
broad bright hunter's moon, and the 
woodcocks, which, chuckling to each 
other, hawked to and fro, like swal- 
lows, between the tree-tops and the 
sky. 

^'Westward Ho!^^ chap. v. 

Wo'oember 5th. 
The bay of Santa Martha is rippling 
before the land-breeze, one sheet of 
living flame. The mighty forests are 
sparkling with myriad fireflies. The 
lazy mist which lounges round the 
inner hill shines golden in the sunset 
rays ; and, nineteen thousand feet aloft, 



262 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

the mighty peak of Horqueta cleaves 
the abyss of air, rose-red against the 
dark-blue vault of heaven. The rosy 
cone fades to a dull leaden hue; but 
only for a while. The stars flash out 
one by one, and Yenus, like another 
ttioon, tinges the eastern snows with 
gold, and sheds across the bay a long 
yellow line of rippling light. Every- 
where is glory and richness. 

'■^Westward Ho!^^ chap. xxvi. 



November 6th, 
A little lawn, guarded by great 
rocks, out of every cranny of which the 
ashes grew as freel}^ as on flat ground. 
Their feet were bedded deep in sweet 
fern and wild raspberries, and golden- 



FROM CHARLES KING8LEY. 263 

rod, and purple scabious, and tall blue 
campanulas. Above them, and before 
them, and below them, the ashes shook 
their green filagree in the bright sun- 
shine ; and through them glimpses were 
seen of the purple cliffs above, and, right 
in front, of the great cataract of IS'ant 
Gwynnant, a long snow-white line zig- 
zagging down coal-black cliffs for many 
a hundred feet, and above it, depth be- 
yond depth of purple shadow away 
into the very heart of Snowdon, up the 
long valley of Cwm Dyli, to the great 
amphitheatre of Clogwyn-y-Garnedd ; 
while over all the cone of Snowdon 
rose, in perfect symmetry, between his 
attendant peaks of Lliwedd and Crib 
Coch. 

** Two Years Ago^^ chap. xx. 



264 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

Novemher 7th. 
And even such are those delightful 
glens, which cut the high table-land of 
the confines of Devon and Cornwall, 
and opening each through its gorge of 
down and rock, toward the boundless 
Western Ocean. Each is like the 
other, and each is like no other Eng- 
lish scenery. Each has its upright 
walls, inland of rich oak-wood, nearer 
the sea of dark-green furze, then of 
smooth turf, then of weird black cliffs 
which range out right and left far into 
the deep sea, in castles, spires, and 
wings of jagged ironstone. Each has 
its narrow strip of fertile meadow, its 
crystal trout stream winding across 
and across from one hill-foot to the 
other; its grey stone mill, with the 



FROM CBABLES KimSLEY 265 

water sparkling and humming round 
the dripping wheel; its dark rock 
pools above the tide mark, where the 
salmon-trout gather in from their At- 
lantic wanderings, after each autumn 
flood : its ridge of blown sand, bright 
with golden trefoil and crimson lady's 
fingers ; its grey bank of polished peb- 
bles, down which the stream rattles 
toward the sea below. Each has its 
black field of jagged shark's-tooth rock 
which paves the cove from side to 
side, streaked with here and there a 
pink line of shell sand, and laced with 
white foam from the eternal surge, 
stretching in parallel lines out to the 
westward, in strata set upright on 
edge, or tilted toward each other at 
strange angles by primeval earth- 



266 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

quakes ; — such is the " Mouth " — as 
those coves are called ; and such the 
jaw of teeth which they display, one 
rasp of which would grind abroad the 
timbers of the stoutest ship. To land- 
ward, all richness, softness, and peace ; 
to seaward, a waste and howling wil- 
derness of rock and roller, barren to 
the fisherman, and hopeless to the 
shipwrecked mariner. 

* ' Westivard Ho!^^ chap. vi. 

Noveniber 8th. 
They rowed away for Crowland, by 
many a mere and many an ea ; through 
narrow reaches of clear, brown, glassy 
water ; between the dark-green alders ; 
between the pale-green reeds ; where 
the coot clanked, and the bittern 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 267 

boomed, and the sedge-bird, not con- 
tent with its own sweet song, mocked 
the notes of all the birds around ; and 
then out into the broad lagoons, where 
hung motionless, high over head, hawk 
beyond hawk, buzzard beyond buzzard, 
kite beyond kite, as far as eye could 
see. Into the air, as they rowed on, 
whirred up great skeins of wild fowl 
innumerable, with a cry as of all the 
bells of Crowland, or all the hounds of 
the Bruneswald : while clear above all 
their noise sounded the wild whistle of 
the curlews, and the trumpet note of 
the great white swan. 

^^ Hereward the Wake,^^ chap. xx. 

November 9th. 
A beautiful October morning it was ; 



268 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

one of those in which Dame JSTature, 
healthily tired with the revelry of 
summer, is composing herself, with a 
quiet, satisfied smile, for her winter's 
sleep. Sheets of dappled cloud were 
sliding slowly from the west ; long 
bars of hazy blue hung over the south- 
ern chalk downs, which gleamed pearly 
grey beneath the low southeastern sun. 
In the vale below, soft white flakes 
of the mist still hung over the water 
meadows, and barred the dark trunks 
of the huge elms and poplars, whose 
fast-yellowing leaves came showering 
down at every rustle of the western 
breeze, spotting the grass below. The 
river swirled along, glassy no more, but 
dingy grey with autumn rains and 
rotting leaves. All beyond the garden 



FBOM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 269 

told of autumn; bright and peaceful, 
even in decay ; but up the sunny slope 
of the garden itself, and to the very 
window-sill, summer still lingered. The 
beds of red verbena and geranium 
were still brilliant, though choked 
with fallen leaves of acacia and plane ; 
the canary plant, still untouched by 
frost, twined its delicate green leaves, 
and more delicate yellow blossoms, 
through the crimson lacework of the 
Yirginia-creeper ; and the great yellow 
noisette swung its long canes across 
the window, filling all the air with 
fruity fragrance. 

" Two Years Ago^** chap. i. 

November 10th. 
All who have traveled through the 



270 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

delicious scenery of J^orth Devon must 
needs know the little white town of 
Bideford, which slopes upward from 
its broad tide-river paved with yellow 
sands, and many-arched old bridge 
where salmon wait for autumn floods, 
toward the pleasant upland on the 
west. Above the town the hills close 
in, cushioned with deep oak woods, 
through which juts here and there a 
crag of fern-fringed slate ; below they 
lower, and open more and more in 
softly-rounded knolls, and fertile 
squares of red and green, till they sink 
into the wide expanse of hazy flats, 
rich salt-marshes, and rolling sand-hills, 
where Torridge joins her sister Taw, 
and both together flow quietly toward 
the broad surges of the bar, and the 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY 271 

everlasting thunder of the long Atlan- 
tic swell. 

" Westward J5b/" chap. i. 

November 11th. 
The sketch was labeled, the "Tri- 
umph of Woman." In the foreground, 
to the right and left, were scattered 
groups of men, in the dresses and in- 
signia of every period and occupation. 
The distance showed, in a few bold 
outlines, a dreary desert, broken by 
alpine ridges, and furrowed here and 
there by a wandering watercourse. 
Long shadows pointed to the half -risen 
sun, whose disc was climbing above 
the waste horizon. And in front of 
the sun, down the path of the morn- 
ing beams, came Woman, clothed only 



272 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

in the armor of her own loveliness. 
Her bearing was stately, and yet 
modest ; in her face pensive tenderness 
seemed wedded with earnest joy. In 
her right hand lay a cross, the emblem 
of self-sacrifice. Her path across the 
desert was marked by the flowers 
which sprang up beneath her steps; 
the wild gazelle stepped forward trust- 
ingly to lick her hand ; a single wan- 
dering butterfly fluttered round her 
head. As the group, one by one, 
caught sight of her, a human tender- 
ness and intelligence seemed to light 
up every face. The scholar dropped 
his book, the miser his gold, the savage 
his weapons ; even in the visage of the 
half -slumbering sot some nobler recol- 
lection seemed wistfully to struggle 



FB03I CHARLES KINGSLEY, 273 

into life. The artist caught up his 
pencil, the poet his lyre, with eyes that 
beamed forth sudden inspiration. The 
sage, whose broad brow rose above the 
group like some torrent-furrowed Alp, 
scathed with all the temptations and 
all the sorrows of his race, watched 
with a thoughtful smile that preacher 
more mighty than himself. A youth, 
decked out in the most fantastic fop- 
peries of the middle age, stood with 
clasped hands and brimming eyes, as 
remorse and pleasure struggled in his 
face ; and as he looked, the fierce sen- 
sual features seemed to melt, and his 
flesh came again to him like the flesh 
of a little child. The slave forgot his 
fetters; little children clapped their 
hands; and the toil-worn, stunted, 



274 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

savage woman sprang forward to kneel 
at her feet, and see herself transfigured 
in that new and divine ideal of her sex. 

" Yeast,^^ chap. x. 

November 12th, 
For always, from the foot of the 
wolds, the green flat stretched away, 
illimitable, to an horizon where, from 
the roundness of the earth, the distant 
trees and islands were hulled down 
like ships at sea. The firm horse-fen 
lay, bright green, along the foot of the 
wold ; beyond it, the browner peat, or 
deep fen ; and, among that, dark velvet 
alder beds, long lines of reed-rond, 
emerald in spring and golden under 
the autumn sun ; shining " eas " or 
river-reaches ; broad meres dotted with 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 275 

a million fowl, while the cattle waded 
along their edges after the rich sedge- 
grass, or wallowed in the mire through 
the hot summer's day. Here and there, 
too, upon the far horizon, rose a tall 
line of ashen trees, marking some island 
of firm rich soil. In some of them, as 
at Eamsey and Crowland, the huge 
ashes had disappeared before the axes 
of the monks ; and a minster tower 
rose over the fen, amid orchards, gar- 
dens, cornfields, pastures, with here and 
there a tree left standing for shade. 
" Painted with flowers in the spring," 
with "pleasant shores embosomed in 
still lakes," as the monk-chronicler of 
Eamsey has it, those islands seemed to 
such as the monk terrestrial paradises. 

*^ Hereivard the Wake^^^ chap, i. 



276 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

Novemher 13th, 
On they went to the point, where 
the Cyclopean wall of granite cliff 
which forms the western side of Lundy 
ends sheer in a precipice of some three 
hundred feet, topped by a pile of snow- 
white rock, bespangled with golden 
lichens. As they approached, a raven, 
who sat upon the topmost stone, black 
against the bright blue sky, flapped 
lazily away, and sank down the 
abysses of the cliff, as if he scented 
the corpses underneath the surge. 
Below them from the Gull-rock rose a 
thousand birds, and filled the air with 
sound ; the choughs cackled, the hack- 
lets wailed, the great blackbacks 
laughed querulous defiance at the in- 
truders, and a single falcon, with an 



FHOM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 277 

angry bark, dashed out from beneath 
their feet, and hung poised high aloft, 
watching the sea-fowl which swung 
slowly round and round below. 

It was a glorious sight upon a glori- 
ous day. To the northward the glens 
rushed down toward the cliff, crowned 
with grey crags, and carpeted with 
purple heather and green fern; and 
from their feet stretched away to the 
westward the sapphire rollers of the 
vast Atlantic, crowned with a thou- 
sand crests of flying foam. On their 
left hand, some ten miles to the south, 
stood out against the sky the purple 
wall of Hartland cliffs, sinking lower 
and lower as they trended away to 
the southward along the lonel}'' iron- 
bound shores of Cornwall, until they 



278 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

faded, dim and blue, into the blue 
horizon forty miles away. 

" Westward Ho ! " chap, xxxiii. 

November llfth. 

Over their crumbling steps, up 
through their cracks and crannies, 
out upon a dreary slope of broken 
stones, and then — ^before he dives up- 
vrard into the cloud ten yards above 
his head — one breathless look back 
upon the world. 

The horizontal curtain of mist; 
gauzy below, fringed with white 
tufts and streamers, deepening above 
into the blackness of utter night. 
Below it a long gulf of soft yellow 
haze, in which, as in a bath of gold, 
lie delicate bars of far-off western 



FROM CEABLES KINGSLEY. 279 

cloud; and the faint glimmer of the 
western sea, above long knotted spurs 
of hill, in deepest shade, like a bunch 
of purple grapes flecked here and there 
from behind with gleams of golden 
light; and beneath them again, the 
dark woods sleeping over Gwynnant, 
and their dark double sleeping in the 
bright lake below. 

On the right hand Snowdon rises. 
Yast sheets of utter blackness — vast 
sheets of shining light. He can see 
every crag which juts from the green 
walls of Galt-y-Wennalt ; and far past 
it into the Great Yalley of Cwm 
Dyli ; and then the red peak, now as 
black as night, shuts out the world 
with its huge mist-topped cone. But 
on the left hand all is deepest 



280 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

shade. From the highest saw-edges 
where Moel Meirch cuts the golden 
sky, doAvn to the very depths of the 
abyss, all is lustrous darkness, sooty, 
and yet golden still. Let the darkness 
lie upon it forever ! 

" Two Years Ago,^^ chap, xx, 

Novemher 15th. 

He lifts his hands from his eyes at 
last : — what has befallen ? 

Before the golden haze a white veil 
is falling fast. Sea, mountain, lake, 
are vanishing, fading as in a dream« 
Soon he can see nothing but the 
twinkle of a light in Pen-y-gwryd, a 
thousand feet below ; happy children 
are nestling there in innocent sleep. 
Jovial voices are chatting round the 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 281 

fire. What has he to do with youth, 
and health, and joy? Lower, lower, 
ye clouds ! Shut out that insolent and 
intruding spark, till nothing be seen 
but the silver sheet of Cwm Fynnon, 
and the silver zigzag lines which 
wander into it among black morass, 
while down the mountain side go, 
softly sliding, troops of white mist- 
angels. Softly they slide, swift and 
yet motionless, as if by some inner 
will, which needs no force of limbs ; 
gliding gently round the crags, diving 
gently off into the abyss, their long 
white robes trailing about their feet in 
upward-floating folds. " Let us go 
hence," they seem to whisper to the 
God-forsaken, as legends say they 
whispered when they left their 



282 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

doomed shrine in old Jerusalem. 
Let the white fringe fall between 
him and the last of that fair troop; 
let the grey curtain follow, the black 
pall above descend ; till he is alone in 
darkness that may be felt, and in the 
shadow of death. 

" Two Years Ago,^^ chap, xx, 

Novemher 16th, 

What was that ? He started : shud- 
dered — as well he might. Had he 
seen heaven opened ? or another place ? 
So momentary was the vision, that he 
scarce knew what he saw — 

There it was again! Lasting but 
for a moment : but long enough to let 
him see the whole western heaven 
transfigured into one sheet of pale 



FBOM CEARLE8 KINGSLET. 283 

blue gauze, and before it Snowdon 
towering black as ink, with every saw 
and crest cut out, hard and terrible, 
against the lightning-glare; and then 
the blank of darkness. 

Again ! The awful black giant, 
towering high in air, before the gates 
of that blue abyss of flame: but a 
black crown of cloud has settled upon 
his head; and out of it the lightning 
sparks leap to and fro, ringing his 
brows with a coronet of fire. 

Another moment, and the roar of 
that great battle between earth and 
heaven crashed full on Elsley's ears. 

He heard it leap from Snowdon, 
sharp and rattling, across the gulf 
toward him, till it crashed full upon 
the Glyder overhead, and rolled and 



284 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

flapped from crag to crag, and died 
away along the dreary downs. No ! 
There it boomed out again, thunder- 
ing full against Siabod on the left ; and 
Siabod tossed it on to Moel Meirch, 
who answered from all her clefts and 
peaks with a long confused battle- 
growl, and then tossed it across to 
Aran; and Aran, with one dull, bluff 
report from her flat cliff, to nearer 
Lliwedd ; till, worn out with the long 
buffetings of that giant ring, it sank 
and died on Gwynnant far below — but 
ere it died, another and another thun- 
der crash burst; sharper and nearer 
every time, to hurry round the hills 
after the one which roared before 
it. 

** Two Years Ago,''^ chap, xx. 



FBOM CHARLES KING8LEY. 285 

November 17th. 

Three o'clock, upon a still pure 
bright midsummer morning. A broad 
and yellow sheet of ribbed tide-sands, 
through which the shallow river wan- 
ders from one hill-foot to the other, 
whispering round dark knolls of rock, 
and under low tree-fringed cliffs, and 
banks of golden broom. A mile be- 
low, the long bridge and the white 
walled town, all sleeping pearly in the 
soft haze, beneath a cloudless vault of 
blue. The white glare of dawn, which 
last night hung high in the northwest, 
has traveled now to the northeast, 
and above the wooded wall of the 
hills the sky is flushing with rose and 
amber. 

A long line of gulls goes wailing up 



286 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

inland ; the rooks from Annery come 
cawing and sporting round the corner 
at LandcrosSj while high above them 
four or five herons flap solemnly along 
to find their breakfast on the shallows. 
The pheasants and partridges are cluck- 
ing merrily in the long wet grass; 
every copse and hedge-row rings with 
the voice of birds : but the lark, who 
has been singing since midnight in the 
" blank height of the dark," suddenly 
hushes his carol and drops headlong 
among the corn, as a broad-winged 
buzzard swings from some wooded 
peak into the abyss of the valley, and 
hangs high-poised above the heaven- 
ward songster. The air is full of per- 
fume; sweet clover, new-mown hay, 
the fragrant breath of kine, the dainty 



FBOM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 287 

scent of seaweed wreaths and fresh 
wet sand. Glorious day, glorious place, 
" bridal of earth and sky," decked well 
with bridal garlands, bridal perfumes, 

bridal songs. 

^^ Westward Ho!^'' chap. xii. 



Novewher 18th, 
Above their heads the soft blue sky 
was fading into grey, and here and 
there a misty star peeped out : but to 
the westward, where the downs and 
woods of Ealeigh closed in with those 
of Abbotsham, the blue was webbed 
and tufted with delicate white flakes ; 
iridescent spots, marking the path by 
which the sun had sunk, showed all 
the colors of the dying dolphin; and 



288 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

low on the horizon lay a long band 
of grassy green. It was dead calm. 
There was not a breath to stir a blade 
of grass. And yet the air was full of 
sound, a low deep roar which hovered 
over down and wood, salt-marsh and 
river, like the roll of a thousand wheels, 
the tramp of endless armies, or — what 
it was — the thunder of a mighty surge 
upon the boulders of the pebble-ridge. 
The spirit of the Atlantic storm had 
sent forward the token of his coming, 
in the smooth ground-swell which was 
heard inland, two miles away. To-mor- 
row the pebbles, which were now rat- 
tling down with each retreating wave, 
might be leaping to the ridge top, and 
hurled like round-shot far ashore upon 
the marsh by the force of the advanc- 



FBOM CHARLES KINGS LEY. 289 

ing wave, fleeing before the wrath of 
the western hurricane. 

^^ Westward JJo / " chap, ix, 

No'iie'mher 19th. 
The chasm may have been fifteen 
feet deep, and above, about half that 
breadth; but below, the waves had 
hollowed it into dark overhanging 
caverns. Just in front of him a huge 
boulder spanned the crack, and formed 
a natural doorway, through which he 
saw, like a picture set in a frame, the 
far-off blue sea softening into the blue 
sky among brown Eastern haze. Amid 
the haze a single ship hung motionless, 
like a white cloud. J^earer, a black 
cormorant floated sleepily along, and 
dived, and rose again. Nearer again, 



290 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

long lines of flat tide-rock, glittering 
and quivering in the heat, sloped grad- 
ually under the waves, till they ended 
in half -sunken beds of olive oar- weed, 
which bent their tangled stems into a 
hundred graceful curves, and swayed 
to and fro slowly and sleepily. The 
low swell slid whispering among their 
floating palms, and slipped on toward 
the cavern's mouth, as if asking wist- 
fully (so Elsley fancied) when it would 
be time for it to return to that cool 
shade, and hide from all the blinding 
blaze outside. But when his eye was 
enough accustomed to the shade within, 
it withdrew gladly from the glaring 
sea and glaring tide-rocks to the walls 
of the chasm itself; to curved and 
polished sheets of stone, rich brown, 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 291 

with snow-white veins, on which 
danced forever a dappled network of 
pale yellow light. 

*' Two Years Ago^^^ chap. x. 

Novemher Wth, 
And as the sun rose higher and 
higher, a great stillness fell upon the 
forest. The jaguars and the monkeys 
had hidden themselves in the darkest 
depths of the woods. The birds' notes 
died out one by one ; the very butter- 
flies ceased their flitting over the tree- 
tops, and slept with outspread wings 
upon the glossy leaves, undistinguish- 
able from the flowers around them. 
ISTow and then a colibri whirred down- 
ward toward the water, hummed for a 
moment around some pendent flower, 



292 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

and then the living gem was lost in 
the deep blackness of the innerwood, 
among tree-trunks as huge and dark as 
the pillars of some Hindoo shrine ; or 
a parrot swung and screamed at them 
from an overhanging bough; or a 
thirsty monkey slid lazily down a liana 
to the surface of the stream, dipped up 
the water in his tiny hand, and started 
chattering back, as his eyes met those 
of some foul alligator peering upward 
through the clear depths below. In 
shaded nooks beneath the boughs, the 
capybaras, rabbits as large as sheep, 
went paddling sleepily round and 
round, thrusting up their unwieldy 
heads among the blooms of the blue 
water-lilies; while black and purple 
water-hens ran up and down upon the 



FEOM CHARLES KINGSLET, 293 

rafts of floating leaves. The shining 
snout of a fresh-water dolphin rose 
slowly to the surface ; a jet of spray 
whirred up ; a rainbow hung upon it 
for a moment; and the black snout 
sank lazily again. Here and there, 
too, upon some shallow pebbly shore, 
scarlet flamingoes stood dreaming 
knee-deep, on one leg ; crested cranes 
pranced up and down, admiring their 
own finery ; and ibises and egrets 
dipped their bills under water in search 
of prey: but before noon even those 
had slipped away, and there reigned a 
stillness which might be heard — such a 
stillness (to compare small things with 
great) as broods beneath the rich shad- 
ows of Amyas's own Devon woods, or 
among the lonely sweeps of Exmoor, 



294 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

when the heather is in flower — a still- 
ness in which, as Humboldt, says, " If 
beyond the silence we listen for the 
faintest undertones, we detect a stifled, 
continuous hum of insects, which crowd 
the air close to the earth ; a confused 
swarming murmur which hangs round 
every bush, in the cracked bark of 
trees, in the soil undermined by lizards, 
millepedes, and bees ; a voice proclaim- 
ing to us that all E'ature breathes, that 
under a thousand different forms life 
swarms in the gaping and dusty earth, 
as much as in the bosom of the waters, 
and the air which breathes around." 

'* Westward Ho!^^ chap, xxiii. 

Wovemher 21st. 
"See the breadth of light and 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 295 

shadow," said Claude ; " how the pur- 
ple depth of the great lap of the 
mountain is thrown back by the sheet 
of green light on Lliwedd, and the red 
glory on the cliffs of Crib Coch, till 
you seem to look away into the bosom 
of the hill, mile after mile." 

" And look, look," said Yalentia, " at 
the long line of glory with which the 
western sun is gilding the edge of the 
left-hand slope, bringing it nearer and 
nearer to us every moment, against the 
deep blue sky ! " 

"Eut what a form! Perfect light- 
ness, perfect symmetry ! " said Claude. 
"Curve sweeping over curve, peak, 
towering over peak, to the highest 
point, and then sinking down again as 
gracefully as they rose. One can 



"296 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

hardly help fancying that the moun- 
tain moves ; that those dancing lines 
are not instinct with life." 

" At least," said Headly, " that the 
mountain is a leaping wave, frozen just 
ere it fell." 

" Two Years Ago,^^ chap. xx. 

November 22cL 

Up, into the hills ; past white crumb- 
ling chalk-pits, fringed with feathered 
juniper and tottering ashes, their floors 
strewed with knolls of fallen soil and 
vegetation, like wooded islets in a sea 
of milk. — Up, between steep ridges of 
tuft crested with black fir-woods and 
silver beech, and here and there a 
huge yew standing out alone, the ad- 
vanced sentry of the forest, with its 



FEOM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 297 

luscious fretwork of green velvet, like 
a mountain of Gothic spires and pin- 
nacles, all glittering and steaming as 
the sun drank up the dewdrops. The 
lark sprang upward into song, and 
called merrily to the new-opened suji- 
beams, while the wreaths and flakes of 
mist lingered reluctantly about the 
hollows, and clung with dewy fingers 
to every knoll and belt of pine. — Up, 
into the labyrinthine bosom of the 
hills, — but who can describe them ? Is 
not all nature indescribable? every 
leaf infinite and transcendental ? How 
much more those mighty downs, with 
their enormous sheets of spotless turf, 
where the dizzy eye loses all standard 
of size and distance before the awful 
simplicity, the delicate vastness of 



298 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

those grand curves and swells, soft as 
the outlines of a Greek Yenus, as if 
the great goddess-mother Hertha had 
laid herself down among the hills to 
sleep, her Titan limbs wrapped in a thin 
veil of silvery green. 

"Fcosf,'' chap. i. 



Nommher '23d. 
Upon the beach, are half a dozen 
great green and grey heaps of Welsh 
limestone ; behind it, at the cliff foot, 
is the lime-kiln, with its white dusty 
heaps and brown dusty men, its quiv- 
ering mirage of hot air, its strings of 
patient hay-nibbling donkeys, which 
look as if they had just awakened out 
of a flour bin. Above, a green down 



FBOM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 299 

stretches up to bright yellow furze- 
crofts far aloft. Behind, a reedy 
marsh, covered with red cattle, paves 
the valley till it closes in; the steep 
sides of the hills are clothed in oak 
and ash covert. Pleasant little 
glimpses there are, too, of grey stone 
farmhouses, nestling among sycamore 
and beech; bright green meadows, 
alder-fringed ; squares of rich red fal- 
low-field, parted by lines of golden 
furze; all cut out with a peculiar 
blackness and clearness, soft and ten- 
der withal, which betokens a climate 
surcharged with rain. Only, in the 
very bosom of the valley, a soft mist 
hangs, increasing the sense of distance, 
and softening back one hill and wood 
behind another, till the great brown 



300 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

moor which backs it all seems to rise 
out of the empty air. For a thousand 
feet it ranges up, in huge sheets of 
brown heather, in grey cairns and 
screes of granite, all sharp and black- 
edged against the pale blue sky ; and 
all suddenly cut off above by one long 
horizontal line of dark grey cloud, 
which seems to hang there motionless, 
and yet is growing to windward, and 
dying to leeward, forever rushing out 
of the invisible into sight, and into the 
invisible again, at railroad speed. Out 
of nothing the moor rises, and into 
nothing it ascends — a great dark phan- 
tom between earth and sky, boding 
rain and howling tempest, and perhaps 
fearful wreck — for the ground-swell 
moans and thunders on the beach be- 



FROM CHARLES KING8LEY, 301 

hind us, louder and louder every mo- 
ment. 

" Two Years Ago^^^ chap. iii. 

Novewher ^Jfth. 
As he spoke, a long arrow of level 
light flashed down the gorge from 
crag to crag, awakening every crack 
and slab to vividness and life. The 
great crimson sun rose swiftly through 
the dim night-mist of the desert, and 
as he poured his glory down the glen, 
the haze rose in threads and plumes, 
and vanished, leaving the stream to 
sparkle round the rocks, like the liv- 
ing, twinkling eye of the whole scene. 
Swallows flashed by hundreds out of 
the cliffs, and began their air-dance 
for the day ; the jerboa hopped stealth- 



302 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

ily homeward on his stilts from his 
stolen meal in the monastery garden ; 
the brown sand-lizards underneath the 
stones opened one eyelid each, and 
having satisfied themselves that it was 
day, dragged their bloated bodies and 
whip-like tails out into the most burn- 
ing patch of gravel which they could 
find, and nestling together as a further 
protection against cold, fell fast asleep 
again; the buzzard, who considered 
himself lord of the valley, awoke with 
a long querulous bark, and rising aloft 
in two or three vast rings, to stretch 
himself after his night's sleep, hung 
motionless, watching every lark which 
chirruped on the cliffs; while from 
the far-off Kile below, the awakening 
croak of pelicans, the clang of geese, 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 303 

the whistle of the godwit and curlew, 
came ringing up the windings of the 
glen ; and last of all the voices of the 
monks rose chanting a morning hymn 
to some wild Eastern air ; and a new 
day had begun in Scetis, like those 
which went before, and those which 
were to follow after, week after week, 
year after year, of toil and prayer as 
quiet as its sleep. 

^'jHiKpofwf," chap. xi. 

November ^5th, 
Augustine ! Kaphael looked intently 
at the man, a tall, delicate-featured per- 
sonage, with a lofty and narrow fore- 
head, scarred like his cheeks with the 
deep furrows of many a doubt and 
woe. Kesolve, gentle but unbending. 



304 BE A UTIFUL THO UGHT8 

was expressed in his thin, close-set lips 
and his clear, quiet eye ; but the calm 
of his mighty countenance was the calm 
of a worn-out volcano, over which cen- 
turies must pass before the earthquake- 
rents be filled with kindly soil, and the 
cinder-slopes grow gay with grass and 
flowers. 

* Rypatia," chap. xx. 

J^ovember ^6th. 
Some three hundred miles above 
Alexandria, the young monk Philam- 
mon was sitting on the edge of a low 
range of inland cliffs, crested with 
drifting sand. Behind him the desert 
sand-waste stretched, lifeless, intermi- 
nable, reflecting its lurid glare on the 
horizon of the cloudless vault of blue. 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 305 

At his feet the sand dripped and trick- 
led, in yellow rivulets, from crack to 
crack and ledge to ledge, or whirled 
past him in tiny jets of yellow smoke, 
before the fitful summer airs. Here 
and there, upon the face of the cliffs 
which walled in the opposite side of 
the narrow glen below, were cavernous 
tombs, huge old quarries, with obelisks 
and half -cut pillars, standing as the 
workmen had left them centuries be- 
fore ; the sand was slipping down and 
piling up around them, their heads 
were frosted with the arid snow; 
everywhere was silence, desolation — 
the grave of a dead nation, in a dying 
land. And there he sat musing above 
it all, full of life and youth and health 
and beauty — a young Apollo of the 



306 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

desert. His only clothing was a ragged 
sheepskin, bound with a leathern gir- 
dle. His long black locks, unshorn 
from childhood, waved and glistened 
in the sun ; a rich dark down on cheek 
and chin showed the spring of health- 
ful manhood; his hard hands and 
sinewy sunburned limbs told of labor 
and endurance ; his flashing eyes and 
beetling brow, of daring, fancy, pas- 
sion, thought, which had no sphere of 
action in such a place. What did his 
glorious young humanity alone among 

the tombs ? 

*'£'^2>«<ta," chap. i. 

November 27th, 
All else was silent. For old Mrs. 
Earth was still fast asleep ; and, like 



FROM CHARLES KINQSLET. 307 

many pretty people, she looked still 
prettier asleep than awake. The great 
elm-trees in the gold, green meadows 
were fast asleep above, and the cows 
fast asleep beneath them ; nay, the few 
clouds which were about were fast 
asleep likewise, and so tired that they 
had lain down on the earth to rest, in 
long white flakes and bars, among the 
stems of the elm-trees, and along the 
tops of the alders by the stream, wait- 
ing for the sun to bid them rise and 
go about their day's business in the 
clear blue overhead. 

" The Water Babies,^ ^ chap. i. 

Novemher '28th. 
The sea-breeze came in freshly with 
the tide and blew the fog away ; and 



308 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

the little waves danced for joy around 
the buoy, and the old buoy danced 
with them. The shadows of the 
clouds ran races over the bright blue 
bay, and yet never caught each other 
up ; and the breakers plunged mer- 
rily upon the wide white sands, and 
jumped up over the rocks, to see what 
the green fields inside were like, and 
tumbled down and broke themselves 
all to pieces, and never minded it a bit, 
but mended themselves and jumped up 
again. And the terns hovered over 
Tom like huge white dragon-flies with 
black heads, and the gulls laughed like 
girls at play, and the sea-pies, with 
their red bills and legs, flew to and 
fro from shore to shore, and whistled 
sweet and wild. And Tom looked and 



FB03I CHARLES KINGSLEY. 309 

looked, and listened; and he would 
have been very happy, if he could only 
have seen the water babies. 

"TAe Water Babies,^ ^ chap. iv. 

November ^9th. 
A very large pool it was, miles and 
miles across, though the air was so clear 
that the ice cliffs on the opposite side 
looked as if they were close at hand. 
All round it the ice cliffs rose, in walls 
and spires and battlements, and caves 
and bridges, and stories and galleries, 
in which the ice-fairies live, and drive 
awav the storms and clouds, that 
Mother Carey's pool may lie calm from 
year's end to year's end. And the sun 
acted policeman, and walked round 
outside every day, peeping just over the 



310 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

top of the ice wall, to see that all went 
right: and now and then he played 
conjuring tricks, or had an exhibition 
of fireworks, to amuse the ice fairies. 
For he would make himself into four 
or five suns at once, or paint the sky 
with rings and crosses and crescents of 
white fire, and stick himself on the 
middle of them, and wink at the fair- 
ies; and I dare say they were very 
much amused ; for anything's fun in 
the country. 

" The Water Babies,*^ chap. vii. 

November 30th. 

He tried to think, but the river 

would not let him. It thundered and 

spouted out behind him from the 

hatches, and leaped madly past him, 



FROM CHARLES KINOSLEY. 311 

and caught his eyes in spite of him, 
and swept them away down its danc- 
ing waves, and let them go again only 
to sweep them down again and again, 
till his brain felt a delicious dizziness 
from the everlasting rush and the ever- 
lasting roar. And then below, how it 
spread, and writhed, and whirled into 
transparent fans, hissing and twining 
snakes, polished glass-wreaths, huge 
crystal bells, which boiled up from the 
bottom, and dived again beneath long 
threads of creamy foam, and swung 
round posts and roots, and rushed 
blackening under dark weed-fringed 
boughs, and gnawed at the marly 
banks, and shook the ever-restless bul- 
rushes, till it was swept away and 
down over the white pebbles and olive 



312 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

weeds, in one broad rippling sheet of 
molten silver, toward the distant sea. 
Downward it fleeted ever, and bore 
his thoughts floating on its oily stream ; 
and the great trout, with their yellow 
sides and peacock backs, lounged 
among the eddies, and the silver gray- 
ling dimpled and wandered upon the 
shallows, and the May-flies flickered 
and rustled round him like water-fair- 
ies, with their green gauzy wings ; the 
coot clanked musically among the 
reeds; the frogs hummed their cease- 
less vesper-monotone ; the kingfisher 
darted from his hole in the bank like a 
blue spark of electric light ; the swal- 
lows' bills snapped as they twined and 
hawked above the pool; the swifts' 
wings whirred like musket-balls, as 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 313 

they rushed screaming past his head ; 
and ever the river fleeted by, bearing 
his eyes away down the current, till its 
wild eddies began to glow with crimson 
beneath the setting sun. The complex 
harmony of sights and sounds slid 
softly over his soul, and he sank away 
into a still day-dream, too passive for 
imagination, too deep for meditation, 
and 

" Beauty born of murmuring sound, 
Did pass into his face." 

Blame him not. There are more 
things in a man's heart than ever get 
in through his thoughts. 

" Yeastf^^ chap. iii. 



DECEMBER. 



December 1st 
The pleasant short December days, 
when the wind always blows from the 
southwest, till Old Father Christmas 
comes and spreads the great white 
tablecloth, ready for little boys and 
girls to give the birds their Christmas 
dinner of crumbs. 

*'TAe Water Babies,^'' chap, iv. 

December 2d, 
You must be a good Jew, before you 
can be a good Christian. 

^^ Hypatia,^^ chap. xiii. 

December 3d. 
Never was the young abbot heard to 



318 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

speak harshly of any human being. 
"When thou hast tried in vain for 
seven years," he used to say, " to con- 
vert a sinner, then only wilt thou have 
a right to suspect him of being a worse 
man than thyself." That there is a 
seed of good in all men, a Divine 
Word and Spirit striving with all men, 
a gospel and good news which would 
turn the hearts of all men, if abbots 
and priests could but preach it aright, 
was his favorite doctrine, and one 
which he used to defend, when, at rare 
intervals, he allowed himself to discuss 
any subject, from the writings of his 
favorite theologian, Clement of Alex- 
andria. Above all, he stopped, by 
stern rebuke, any attempt to revile 
either heretics or heathens. " On the 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 319 

Catholic Church alone," he used to 
say, " lies the blame of all heresy and 
unbelief : for if she were but for one 
day that which she ought to be, the 
world would be converted before 
nightfall." To one class of sins, in- 
deed, he was inexorable — all but fero- 
cious ; to the sins, namely, of religious 
persons. In proportion to any man's 
reputation for orthodoxy and sanctity, 
Philammon's judgment of him was 
stern and pitiless. More than once 
events proved him to have been unjust : 
when he saw himself to be so, none 
could confess his mistake more frankly, 
or humiliate himself for it more bit- 
terly: but from his rule he never 
swerved; and the Pharisees of the 
!Nile dreaded and avoided him, as much 



320 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

as the publicans and sinners loved and 

followed him. 

" S'^jpafm," chap. XXX. 

Decemher Jfth. 
No wonder that the owners of the 
soil think it no shame to desert their 
estates, when preachers tell them that 
He to Whom they say all power is 
given in heaven and earth has deserted 
His. 

" Fea«f," chap. xiv. 

Deceinber 5th. 
"Would that we clergymen could 
learn (some of us are learning already) 
that influence over our people is not to 
be gained by perpetual interference in 
their private affairs, too often inquisi- 



FBOM CHARLES KING8LEY. 321 

torial, irritating, and degrading to 
both parties, but by showing ourselves 
their personal friends, of like passions 
with them. Let a priest do that. Let 
us make our people feel that we speak 
to them, and feel to them, as men to 
men, and then the more cottages we 
enter the better. If we go into our 
neighbors' houses only as judges, in- 
quisitors, or at best gossips, we are 
best — as too many are — at home in our 
studies. Would, too, that we would 
recollect this — that our duty is, among 
other things, to preach the gospel; 
and consider firstly whether what we 
commonly preach be any gospel or 
good news at all, and not rather the 
worst possible news; and secondly, 
whether we preach at all; whether 



322 BE A UTIFUL THO UQHTS 

our sermons are not utterly unintelli- 
gible (being delivered in an unknown 
tongue), and also of a dulness not to 
be surpassed ; and whether, therefore, 
it might not be worth our while to 
spend a little time in studying the 
English tongue, and the art of touch- 
ing human hearts and minds. 

"rcasf," Preface. 

December 6ih, 
Esau has a birthright. But it is not 
this book, or any man's book, or any 
man at all, who can tell Esau the whole 
truth about himself, his powers, his 
duty, and his God. Woman must do 
it, and not man. His mother, his sis- 
ter, the maid whom he may love ; and 
failing all these (as they often will fail 



FEOM CHARLES KING8LEY, 323 

him, in the wild wandering life which 
he must live), those human angels of 
whom it is written — " The barren hath 
many more children than she who has 
an husband." And such will not be 
wanting. As long as England can 
produce at once two such women as 
Florence Nightingale and Catherine 
Marsh, there is good hope that Esau 
will not be defrauded of his birthright ; 
and that by the time that Jacob comes 
crouching to him, to defend him 
against the enemies who are near at 
hand, Esau, instead of borrowing 
Jacob's religion, may be able to teach 
Jacob his ; and the two brothers face 
together the superstition and anarchy 
of Europe, in the strength of a lofty 
and enlightened Christianitj^, which 



324 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

shall be thoroughly human, and there- 
fore thoroughly divine. 

^^Yeast^^^ Preface. 

December 7th. 
Hereward was spent. He had lived 
his life ; and had no more life which 
he could live ; for every man, it would 
seem, brings into the world with him 
a certain capacity, a certain amount of 
vital force, in body and in soul ; and 
when that is used up, the man must 
sink down into some sort of second 
childhood; and end, like Hereward, 
very much where he began : unless the 
grace of God shall lift him up above 
the capacity of the mere flesh, into a 
life literally new, ever-renewing, ever- 
expanding, and eternal. 

*• Hereward the Wdket^ cbap. xli. 



FROM CHARLES KINQSLEY. 325 

Decetriber 8th. 
Has it ever occurred to you how 
noble the man is, even in his mistakes ? 
How that one thought, that the finest 
thing in the world is to be utterly good, 
and to make others good also, puts him 
three heavens at least above you, you 
most unangelic terrier-dog, bemired all 
day long by grubbing after vermin ! 

" Two Years Ago,^ chap. y. 

DecernheT 9th. 
" Oh, how blind I have been ! How 
I have wasted my time in laying down 
the law to these people ; fancying my- 
self infallible, as if God were not as 
near to them as He is to me — certainly 
nearer than to any book on my shelves 
-—offending their little prejudices, lit- 



326 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

tie superstitions, in my own cruel self- 
conceit and self-will ! And now, the 
first time that I forget my own rules ; 
the first time that I forget almost that 
I am a priest, even a Christian at all ! 
that moment they acknowledge me as 
a priest, as a Christian. The moment 
I meet them upon the commonest hu- 
man ground, helping them as one 
heathen would help another, simply be- 
cause he was his own flesh and blood, 
that moment they soften to me, and 
show me how much I might have done 
with them twelve months ago, had I 
had but common sense ! " 

*' Two Years Ago,^^ chap. xvii. 

December 10th. 
" The proper use of reasoning is to 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 327 

produce opinion, — and if the subject in 
which you wish to produce the opinion 
is diseased, you must adapt the medi- 
cine accordingly." 

** Yeast^^^ chap. x. 

December 11th. 
"We do retain some dim belief in a 
God — even I am beginning to believe 
in believing in Him. And therefore, 
as I begin to suppose, it is that we 
reverence facts as the word of God, 
His acted words and will, which we 
dare not falsify; which we believe 
will tell their own story better than 
we can tell it for them. If our eyes 
are dimmed, we think it safer to cleiar 
them, which do belong to us, than to 
bedevil, by the light of those very al- 



328 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

ready dimmed eyes, the objects round, 
which do not belong to us. Whether 
we are consistent or not about the cor- 
ruptness of man, we are about the in- 
corruptness of God; and therefore 
about that of the facts by which God 
teaches men; and believe, and will 
continue to believe, that the blackest 
of all sins, the deepest of all Atheisms, 
that which, above all things, proves no 
faith in God's government of the uni- 
verse, no sense of His presence, no un- 
derstanding of His character, is — a lie. 

" rieasf," chap. x. 

Decemher l^th. 
There is a bad pleasure — happy he 
who has not felt it — in a pitiless re- 
ductio ad ahsurdum^ which asks taunt- 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 329 

ingly, "Why do you not follow out 
your own conclusions?" — instead of 
thanking God that people do not fol- 
low them out, and that their hearts 
are sounder than their heads. 

^^Yeastf^'' chap, viii, 

Decemher 13th, 
"What's done you can't mend. 
What's left, you can. Whatever has 
happened is God's concern now, and 
none but His. Do you see that as far 
as you can no such thing ever happen 
again, on the face of His earth. And 
from that day, sir, I gave myself up to 
that one thing, and will until I die, to 
save the poor young fellows like my- 
self, who are left nowadays to the 
Devil, body and soul, just when they 



330 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

are in the prime of their power to 
work for God." 

" Feasf, " chap. viii. 

December IJfth. 
For my part I seem to have learned 
that the only thing to regenerate 
the world is not more of any sys- 
tem, good or bad, but simply more of 
the Spirit of God. 

^^ Alton Locke,'' ^ chap. x. 

December 15th. 
Prayer is the only refuge against 
the Walpurgis — dance of the witches 
and the fiends, which at hapless mo- 
ments whirl unbidden through a mor- 
tal brain. 

** Two Years Ago,'''' chap. xix. 



FROM CHARLES KING8LEY, 331 

Deceinber 16th. 
"I am no scollard, as they would 
say in Whitf ord, you know ; but it has 
often struck me that if folks would but 
believe that the apostles talked not 
such very bad Greek, and had some 
slight notion of the received meaning 
of the words they used, and of the 
absurdity of using the same term to 
express nineteen different things, the 
"Eqw Testament would be found to be 
a much simpler and more severely phil- 
osophic book than * Theologians ' (* An- 
throposophists ' I call them) fancy." 

" Yeast, ^^ chap. xv. 

December 17th, 
" I have watched for you for many 
a day, and not in vain. When I saw 



332 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

you, an experienced officer, encumber 
your flight with wounded men, I was 
only surprised. But since I have seen 
you, and your daughter, and, strangest 
of all, your gay young Alcibiades of a 
son, starving yourselves to feed those 
poor ruffians— performing for them, 
day and night, the offices of menial 
slaves — comforting them, as no man 
ever comforted me — blaming no one 
but yourselves, caring for every one 
but yourselves, sacrificing nothing but 
yourselves ; and all this without hope 
of fame or reward, or dream of ap- 
peasing the wrath of any god or god- 
dess, but simply because you thought 
it right. . . . When I saw that, sir, 
and more which I have seen ; and 
when, reading in this book here, I 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLET. 333 

found most unexpectedly those very 
grand moral rules which you were 
practicing, seeming to spring uncon- 
sciously, as natural results, from the 
great thoughts, true or false, which 
had preceded them ; then, sir, I began 
to suspect that the creed which could 
produce such deeds as I have watched 
within the last few days, might have 
on its side not merely a slight pre- 
ponderance of probabilities, but what 
we Jews used once to call, when we 
believed in it — or in anything — the 
mighty power of God." 

**Sypatia," chap. xvii. 

December 18th. 
And she told him how many fine 
things there were to be seen in the 



334 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

world, and what an odd, curious, 
pleasant, orderly, respectable, well- 
managed, and, on the whole, successful 
(as, indeed, might have been expected) 
sort of a place it was, if people would 
only be tolerably brave and honest and 
good in it ; and then she told him not 
to be afraid of anything he met, for 
nothing would harm him if he re- 
membered all his lessons, and did what 
he knew was right. 

*' The Water Babies^^^ chap, vi, 

December 19th. 
Others can be very sentimental 

when they choose, like a good many 

people who are both cruel and greedy, 

and no good to anybody at all. 

*' The Water Babiei,^^ chap, iii. 



FROM CHARLES KING8LEY, 335 

December 20th. 
A man may learn from his Bible to 
be a more thorough gentleman than if 
he had been brought up in all the 
drawing-rooms in London. 

*' The Water Babies,^^ chap. iii. 

December 21st. 
Epimetheus got a great deal of trou- 
ble, as most men do in this world : but 
he got the three best things in the 
world into the bargain — a good wife, 

and experience, and hope. 

" The Water Babies," chap. vii. 

DeceinbeT 22d. 
Then came Tom to the great land of 
Hearsay, in which are no less than 
thirty and odd kings, beside half a 



336 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

dozen republics, and perhaps more by 
next mail. 

And there he fell in with a deep, 
dark, deadly and destructive war, 
waged by the princes and potentates 
of those parts, both spiritual and tem- 
poral, against what do you think? 
One thing I am sure of. That unless 
I told you, you would never know ; 
nor how they waged that war either ; 
for all their strategy and art military 
consisted in the safe and easy process 
of stopping their ears and screaming, 
" Oh, don't tell us ! " and then running 
away. 

" The Water Baiies,^^ chap. viii. 

December 23d ^ 
All her delight was, whenever she 



FBOM CHARLES KINQ8LEY. 337 

had a spare moment, to play with 
babies, in which she showed herself a 
woman of sense; for babies are the 
best company, and the pleasantest 
playfellows in the world ; at least, so 
all the wise people in the world think. 

*' The Water Babies;' chap. v. 

Decemher ^^th. 

" We will have no sad forebodings on 

the eve of the blessed Christmas-tide. 

He lives. He loves, He reigns ; and all 

is well, for we are His and He is ours." 

^'•Two Years Ago,' ^ Introduction. 

Decemher ^5th. 
Here and there, among rich and 
poor, there are those whose heart and 
flesh, whose conscience and whose in- 



338 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

tellect, cry out for the Living God, 
and will know no peace till they have 
found Him. For till then they can 
find no explanation of the three 
great human questions — Where am I ? 
Whither am I going ? What must I 
do? 

^^ Sermons on the Pentateuch,^' 

December 26th. 
"Ah," said Stangrave, "when Em- 
erson sneered at you English for be- 
lieving your Old Testament, he little 
thought that that was the lesson which 
it had taught you ; and that that same 
lesson was the root of all your great- 
ness. That that belief in God's being, 
in some mysterious way, the living 
King of England and of Christendom, 



FEOM CHARLES KJNGSLEY. 339 

has been the very idea which has kept 
you in peace and safety now for many 
a hundred years, moving slowly on 
from good to better, not without many 
backslidings and many shortcomings, 
but still finding out, quickly enough, 
when you were on the wrong road, 
and not ashamed to retrace your steps, 
and to reform^ as brave, strong men 
should dare to do ; a people who have 
been for many an age in the vanguard 
of all the nations, and the champions 
of sure and solid progress throughout 
the world ; because what is new among 
you is not patched artificially on to 
the old, but grows organically out of 
it, with a growth like that of your 
own English oak, whose every new- 
year's leaf-crop is fed by roots which 



340 BEAUTIFUL TEO'UQETS 

burrow deep in many a buried genera- 
tion, and the rich soil of full a thou- 
sand years. 

" Two Years Ago,^^ Introduction. 

Decetriber 27th. 

" I never was made, my child ; and I 
shall go forever and ever ; for I am as 
old as Eternity, and yet as young as 
Time." 

And there came over the lady's face 
a very curious expression — very sol- 
emn, and very sad ; and yet very, very 
sweet. And she looked up and away, 
as if she were gazing through the sea, 
and through the sky at something far, 
far off ; and as she did so there came 
such a quiet, tender, patient, hopeful 
smile over her face that Tom thought 



FEOM CHARLES KINGSLEY. 341 

for the moment that she did not look 
ugly at all. And no more she did ; for 
she was like a great many people who 
have not a pretty feature in their faces, 
and yet are lovely to behold, and draw 
little children's hearts to them at once ; 
because though the house is plain 
enough, yet from the windows a 
beautiful and good spirit is looking 
forth. 

"TAc Water Babies,^ ^ chap. v. 
Deceniber 28th, 

When all the world is old, lad, 

And all the trees are brown, 
And all the sport is stale, lad. 

And all the wheels run down ; 
Creep home and take your place there, 

The spent and maimed among : 
God grant you find one face there 

You loved when all was young. 

" The Water Babies,^ ^ chap. ii. 



342 BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS 

December 29th. 
" I saw at last ! I found out that I 
had been trying for years which was 
stronger, God or I ; I found out I had 
been trying whether I could not do 
well enough without Him ; and there I 
found that I could not — could not ! I 
felt like a child who had marched off 
from home, fancying it can find its 
way, and is lost at once. I did not 
know that I had a Father in heaven 
Who had been looking after me, when 
I fancied I was looking after my- 
self. I don't half believe it now. . . ." 
And so the old heart passed away 
from Thomas Thurnall, and instead 
of it grew up the heart of a little 
child. 

"Two Years a^fo,'* chap, xxviii. 



FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY, 343 

December 30th. 

Among all the songs, one came 
across the water more sweet and clear 
than all ; for it was the song of a young 
girl's voice. 

And what was the song which she 
sang? Ah, my little man, I am too 
old to sing that song, and you too 
young to understand it. But have 
patience, and keep your eye single, and 
your hands clean, and you will learn 
some day to sing it yourself, without 
needing any man to teach you. 

*' The Water Babies,^' chap, viii, 

December 31st. 
When God is ready for each man, 
then he must go ; and when can he go 
better. 

" Wefiward Ho!^^ chap, i. 



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